The regrets about Marie Louise, the apology, the instructions to give her money, all of it made me suspect Lennox more. There was something weird about it. He was getting ready to confess. He was feeling bad. He was slumped on that bar stool now, head in his hands. Suddenly, he looked up.
“You think I fucking killed these people to get their apartments?” Lennox said, angry again now. “That’s what you’ve been thinking all along, isn’t it? You think because I’m black, I have it in me to kill people?”
“You don’t have to be black.”
“But I am.”
“Calm down,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“Then tell me something. Tell me about Marianna Simonova.”
In his face I saw something I hadn’t seen before. I saw how much he hated the Russian. I saw that she was somehow connected to all of it, at the bottom of it all.
It was quiet in the club. The bartender was waiting for us to finish. I could hear the clock over the bar tick. Could hear the cars outside.
“You want me to tell you about her?”
“She was a crazy woman who made up stories about her past,” Lennox said. “Crazy like a fox. She tells everyone, ‘I was Paul Robeson’s girlfriend, I was an important person.’ All the time she’s saying how she just loves black people, seeing as how we’re so oppressed, we’re so fucking pure, we’re so decent.” He looked at me. “I couldn’t stand her-what she said, even how she looked, the way she smelled. That stink of incense and cigarette smoke, the imperious way she had, ordering everyone around.”
“Why didn’t they tell her to fuck off?”
“She seduced everybody with those fucking stories. She’d tell you she was the mother of Jesus Christ if it would get her some attention.”
Lennox’s voice possessed the fury of somebody who’d been hurt really bad.
“What else?” I said.
“You should really listen to me,” Lennox said. “I didn’t kill anybody. I’m trying to tell you something and you’re not hearing me. Hold on.” He reached for his coat that was over the bar stool next to him. He pulled out a brown leather folder, the kind where you keep photographs.
“Nobody knows about this, man,” said Lennox. “But I’m going to tell you, OK? I’m going to tell you some shit so you can go and solve your fucking crimes, you and that Virgil.”
He had the look of a man who was going to confess, wanted to confess. Then he got up abruptly, stumbling over the bar stool.
“I have to get some air,” he said. “I had too much to drink, I’m just wasted, man.” He glanced at me and smiled slightly, but it was the sad smile of a man who knows he’s washed up. “Don’t worry,” Lennox added. “I’ll be back. You can come with me. Or you can watch me through the window, watch me puke, if you want.”
My heart raced. I was sweating. I knew he was getting ready to talk. I wanted him to trust me. He waited for my permission.
I ordered another beer. I didn’t drink it. The young couple left the club. The bartender wiped down the tables and looked at me. He wanted to close up.
The time seemed to drag.
“Go on,” I said. “Get some air.”
“You coming? Or you want to trust me?” He tossed some money on the bar.
I didn’t have much time to think. I saw he was going to puke. I told him to go.
From where I was, standing close to the window, to the door, I could see the street. I saw Lennox bent double. Then I thought he was going to run after all, getting in position, a runner’s position. He seemed to take a step. I got my gun, yelled at the bartender to call 911 for help.
I’d been a jerk. You didn’t use psychology with a killer. The idea that my trusting him would make him talk had been crazy. He was a man in a rage. I ran.
For a split second, I lost sight of Lennox. There was a heavy velvet curtain over the door, the kind they put up in the winter to keep the cold out, and it obscured my view. By the time I got outside, it was too late.
CHAPTER 51
When I knelt beside Carver Lennox on the sidewalk outside the club, I saw he was bleeding bad.
“Carver?”
I could feel his breath, still warm, on my face. He was bleeding from his gut, from his face. It had happened so fast that he’d never had a chance. Somebody had put a knife in him before I got outside.
Near where he lay on the cold sidewalk was a long, curved knife. The attacker had left in a hurry. He had been distracted by something, startled enough to drop the knife. Next to it were Lennox’s horn-rims.
“Carver?”
He didn’t answer. I tried CPR as best I could. I wrapped my jacket over his wound.
The bartender had called 911, and now I heard sirens.
“Carver? Cal? You hear me?”
He tried to talk, wanted to say something, but he couldn’t. His mouth was full of blood.
“Come on. Stay with me.” I put my fingers against his neck.
He had known he was in trouble. Had been trying to tell me something in the club, trying to show me something. Was it the financial meltdown that had caught him in its claws? He owed money. Maybe the attack had come from somebody who wanted it back.
All over town, panicked, frantic people were doing bad deals, borrowing money, desperate to hang on to some piece of their lives. Carver Lennox was so invested in the life he had made for himself-Princeton, the job at Goldman, the kids in private school, most of all the Armstrong-it was hard to know what he’d do to hang on to it all. The building had a grip on everybody in it; its history, its presence, even the sheer glamour it had once represented. For Lennox, it was also the future.
Come on! Stay with me!
Was it about Hutchison’s murder? Was that what he wanted to tell me? About the other deaths in the Armstrong?
I looked down now at the face. Without the glasses, he looked so young, the expression so placid, except for the blood. When he tried to speak again, blood poured from his mouth. Something he wanted to tell me. I leaned closer. He flicked his eyes to the left.
A spill of things was scattered on the ground, stuff that must have come from his pocket-keys, change, a billfold, the brown leather folder he had tried to show me in the club.
The sirens came closer, cars turned into the street. I looked up.
Out of nowhere, I saw him. A car went by, and in the headlights, I saw the guy who must have been hiding back of a truck farther along the avenue. The guy I had seen earlier when I arrived. Guy with a black jacket.
Now he was running north on St. Nicholas. A big man, light on his feet. In headlights from the cars, his hair looked white.
I got out my phone and called in his description, this big man with white hair, but I couldn’t leave Carver. His hand was in mine. It was still warm. I could feel a faint pulse in the wrist. My other hand was still on his neck, pressing, blood coming out between my fingers. Then he said something, said something so softly I had to put my ear to his mouth.
“What is it?”
“Pictures,” he whispered. I picked up the leather folder. He nodded. I held it out to him, but he couldn’t raise his arm, and his eyes were closed now. I stuffed it in my jeans.
Medics emerged from the ambulance at the curb. They loaded Carver Lennox into it, took him to Presbyterian. I called Lucille Bernard at home. I left a message with her office, on her cell.
“Artie?” It was Virgil Radcliff, who had arrived at the scene a few minutes earlier, along with a couple of cops in uniform and Jimmy Wagner.
I was wet from the snow and ice, my shirt and pants were covered with blood. “Did you tell Jimmy we had made Lennox for the killer?” I asked Virgil.
“It wasn’t him, Artie. I know that now. He had an alibi.”
“Sure, but it was his daughter, wouldn’t she lie for him?”
“Yeah, could be, but seems the daughter had a friend with her, and the friend had her dad with her. They arrived just after Lennox and his kid-I didn’t pay attention to them on the tape at first because they didn’t set off any alarm bells. But they were there and they stayed until early morning. Said they lived in Carroll Gardens, and it was too far to head back to Brooklyn after the party, so Lennox invited them to stay. We got them going in, leaving. The girl’s father swore they were there all night.”