“Where is she?”
“Her sister Vanessa lives over at the Hurston-it’s a new condo on Broadhurst,” Lennox said. “Let me go.” He took my arm. “Please let me go. We’re close. Celestina helped me out when I first got here. She was like my mom, swear to God. How did this happen?”
“Fine,” I said. “Listen, you knew Amahl Washington?”
“What? Sure. You asking me that now? Why?”
“Never mind.”
“That’s it?”
“For now. Give me your number,” I said, and I got out my phone and punched it in.
“Artie?”
“Yeah, Jimmy.”
“That girl from the ME says she can’t say until she looks at X-rays and they start the autopsy if the old guy just toppled over by the garbage cans or what. Jesus, you can’t even say girl-I mean officer,” said Wagner. “She says her guess is he fell off something high up, the way the body was splayed out on the ground. I don’t know, a terrace, or the roof, the building could be liable and then we have a shitstorm coming down.” He wheezed and began coughing.
“Or he was pushed.”
Wagner looked up at the building. “Christ, no, not another homicide. You think? Shit, man.” He hacked again, turned his head, spit into a big handkerchief, and I saw there was blood on it.
“Take it easy.”
“The cold weather stinks,” said Jimmy. His big face, the reddish hair going gray under his black wool watch cap, the veins in his nose, the way he gulped at the air once in a while, he was a very sick guy. He pulled his jacket tight around his bulky body and turned up the collar. “This sucks,” he said. “Christmas coming, an old man dead, one of the best buildings. Fuck.”
“Don’t ask me exactly why right now, but can you get me Amahl Washington’s medical records? I need to know if he really just passed, if that was all.”
“I ain’t asking why, but I’m asking why, Art.”
“Personal favor.”
“Then consider it done.”
“If Lennox is going over to find the wife at her sister’s, I want to go up to the apartment with Radcliff, take a little look before anyone else goes up. You can do that, Jim? I need twenty minutes. Thirty. Tell your guys to hang on down here, or let them canvass the building or whatever.”
“You got it,” he said. “One more thing, there’s a time component.”
“How’s that?”
“It’s Sunday. Things are quiet. Come tomorrow morning, maybe before, I’m going to have officials on the phone. Hutchison was a big deal in the community, and I’m not even sure one of them churches doesn’t own part of the land the Armstrong is on. They’ll all be on me, the preachers, the rest, Christ, for all I know, Al fucking Sharpton will show. You hear me?” He coughed some more. “I’ll feel a whole fucking lot better when Dawes gets back on Wednesday.”
“I’m ready, Artie,” said Virgil, who had been talking to the medic. Next to Jimmy Wagner, Virgil looked tall, young, and easy. It was like looking at Obama and McCain. I think Jimmy Wagner saw it, too. He shuffled away to join the other cops, then he turned around.
“Tomorrow,” Wagner called out. “You hear me?”
CHAPTER 35
H e was pushed,” said Virgil, trying the door to the Hutchison apartment.
“I thought that, but tell me how you figure it?”
“You were with Wagner, I was talking to the ME, and she was saying it looked to her like Hutchison hit the ground from someplace high up, you heard that, right? So I get to thinking, Artie, since you’re asking, I mean how’s he going to just fall?” He got some keys from his pocket.
“Where’d you get those?”
“I sweet-talked Mr. Diaz,” said Virgil, opening the door.
“Let’s go. I want a good look before the rest of them get here.”
“Right,” said Virgil, pushing open the door.
“Jesus.”
“What’s that, Artie?” Virgil flipped on a light in the hall of the apartment, surveying the room.
“He went up there a lot to smoke, right? Maybe something happened. His wife didn’t like him going up there. They played this game that she locked him in the apartment. What do you think her game really was?”
“Humiliation.”
“Right. Yeah.”
“What did Wagner mean when he said ‘tomorrow’?” asked Virgil.
“Wagner wants this, whatever it is, wrapped by tomorrow. Says on Monday people will start to make noise, officials, people who want a piece of the publicity.”
“What else?”
“Says he’ll be glad when Dawes is back. I met him over at your station house.”
Virgil was silent.
“Wagner told me Dawes was your partner.”
“We split up. He didn’t like the way I do things, he thought I was some kind of loose cannon,” said Virgil. “Don’t get me wrong; Dawes is a good man, but it’s like working for your censorious uncle,” he added. “Listen, Artie, maybe Lionel could have had a heart attack and then fallen?” He had changed the subject.
“He was healthy as a horse. He told me he swam off Coney Island every winter.”
“Told me, too.”
“Listen, Virgil, you OK here by yourself for a couple minutes?”
“Sure.”
“See if you can find any of Hutchison’s notes. He kept a little notebook, maybe he wrote stuff down about people he treated,” I said. “Or helped.”
“You talking about his interest in euthanasia? I’d want my grandparents to go out easy,” Virgil said. “Wouldn’t you, Artie?”
I thought about my mother.
“I guess. Anyway, see if you can find the fucking dog too; maybe it crawled under something and fell asleep. This apartment has about nine rooms, from what I saw. I’m going on the roof.”
“What for?”
“Can you just do this? We only have twenty minutes until there’s cops all over this place.”
“Be careful up there.”
The wind whipped at my face. There was snow on the roof. The sun was coming up, and the sky was bright and slashed with color.
There were footprints in the snow that led from the door to the low brick wall.
Had Lionel come up here to smoke again? Had somebody else been here? Somebody who had pushed him? The footprints looked fresh, but it was hard to tell.
From the street I heard the sirens. From somewhere on the roof came the banging of a radiator, a generator, the noisy innards of an ancient building. The wind howled.
At the edge of the roof was the plastic sheet I’d seen the day before, some cans of paint, a ladder. The wall here was broken, and I could look over and see the cracked back of one of the stone figures-a gargoyle-that faced the street.
In spite of the fancy marble fireplace in the lobby, the high ceiling, the old chandeliers, restored now, the doormen in their caps with the gold braid, this was no fairy-tale castle on a hill. It had, like most of the great old buildings in the city, a secret life, all the histories buried in the apartments, in the basement rooms, in the people who had lived here on and on for decades.
A building was like a village, enclosed, wrapped up in its own life, with its own class system and a ruling caste-the co-op board. These were people who had power-it might be power to decide who got in, or just what kind of decorations went on the Christmas tree.
I had once worked a case where potential owners were so desperate to get into a co-op, they had their dogs’ voice boxes removed so they wouldn’t bark. Couldn’t get into a good co-op if your dog was noisy. I had worked another co-op downtown on Eleventh Street where one owner hated the color of paint in the lobby so much that, after a lot of martinis, he went for the board president with a sushi knife. Cut the tip of his nose off.
Easy at the Armstrong to get people talking, kids, old people, guys working around the place, guests at the party the night before. It was a talkative group, and they talked about the building, the Armstrong, its past, its problems, its glories. It was one of the building pastimes, like villagers in Russia might talk about the potato crop.