Overberg hunched his shoulders like some creature in the wild sizing up its predicament. Fight or flight. With the back of one foot, he slowly closed the door.
“You spoke to Ted’s mother. I watched you from this room. Frowzy old mop. Would you believe she’s a decade younger than me?” Behind dusty glass the treetops moved in the cool spring sunshine. “And her son was a piece of work. I peered into him and found a rather twisted soul under that nasty exterior.”
“A twisted soul that you took advantage of.”
“He needed money. I had a job for him.”
“You had a job for him, all right,” the chief remarked, “but not the type of job he could speak openly to his mother about.”
“We came to an agreement—”
“About disposing of Angela Le-may,” the chief put in mercilessly.
Overberg bristled. “No. That shouldn’t have happened! The man was a fool! I wanted him to scare her, make her realize that she needed a protector. But he got carried away. I was devastated.” Overberg sniffed. “Naturally I told him he would have to get rid of the evidence, that it was his problem. Only later did I discover what the maniac had done.”
Overberg’s cold blue eyes turned to the chute.
“My God!” Robideau breathed. He understood now the clinical tidiness of the bathroom in the suite one floor below, and the unnatural cleanliness here in this room. Someone had scoured them. Scrubbed them clean. Tozer must have done his grisly work in her apartment, then slipped up here to use the disposal chute. How many trips had he made? What had he been thinking about?
Overberg was talking again.
“Afterwards he wanted more money, much more. I think his mind had begun to come apart. He had some mad idea that I was fabulously wealthy, that because I owned this modest apartment block I could dash off checks for spectacular stuns. I couldn’t pay anything close to what he was demanding.”
The chief was finding it difficult to take his eyes off the chute. “So you paid him nothing. And to hit back at you, and perhaps change your mind about it, he scrawled that warning on the back of your building.”
“Yes. And I was worried, at first, I’ll admit it. But he wanted those scrawls to look like real graffiti, wanted me to believe some third person knew of our secret — and he outdid himself. When I saw how incomprehensible the markings were, I relaxed a little. Anyway, I knew it was him. It was sneaky. The sort of thing he would do.” Overberg pushed his hands deep in his pockets. “He was an odious man who deserved what he got.”
“So what happened then? I suppose you got him up here to renegotiate, then knocked him on the head with a hunk of that old plumbing. Maybe even this bar.” He looked at the bar in his hand with new appreciation.
The grin returned for a moment, a brief flicker. “He attacked me. It was self-defense.”
“No. He wouldn’t do that. He wanted money from you.” The chief nudged the freezer. “I’d say getting him into this thing was the hard part, but I’m sure you’re fit enough to manage it.” Robideau shook his head. “Why were you so bitter towards Angela?”
For a moment the man seemed uncertain, his confidence gone. He said, as if explaining it to himself, “I suppose I was flattered. A woman her age taking an interest in a man of my years. Oh, I’m well preserved, as they say, but still I was aware of the gulf between us. A regular chasm. And when she seemed ready to overlook it — yes, I was flattered.”
“But you misled her. You had no intention of funding her school.”
“Well, I don’t know. Perhaps if she had shown me a positive business case...”
“You wanted to possess her. Control her. So you got her out of the city, put her up in an apartment, made all sorts of promises to her. But the bottom line was that she was to become your property. You expected thanks of the most physical kind, and when it wasn’t forthcoming, you lost your temper with her. That’s why she wouldn’t let you in the apartment, why you had to meet with her in this room. That’s why she changed the lock on her door.”
Something angry and evil flickered in the old man’s eyes. “She was using me. Leading me on!”
“And so her fate was sealed.”
“All of our fates are sealed, Chief Robideau — yours included.”
Overberg brought his hand out of his pocket then, and there was a pistol in his grip. A very tiny pistol — tiny and deadly. He twitched the thin barrel.
“Get into that freezer.”
Robideau didn’t move. His grip tightened on the bar.
Six floors below, Leonard Boski was in a foul mood. He had tried every solvent available to him, finally being reduced to employing raw gasoline. But his exertions only served to smudge the stubborn ink even more deeply into the porous brick. He returned angrily to the furnace room and banged the gasoline can down on the bench.
“You mean you’re not a chemical whiz after all?” Chuck Lang asked with a sly contempt. “You, a rocket scientist?”
Leonard was fuming. “Shut up!”
“Oh, I’ll shut up. Whatever you say, professor.”
It was too much for Leonard. He had scorned rough red brick till his arms ached, his hands were bleached from all the chemical indignities they’d undergone, and now he was expected to endure this verbal abuse on top of it all? It was too much. He flung the furnace door open and began firing cans and bottles into the flames. “Hey, buddy, hold it!” Chuck Lang bellowed. But it was too late. He saw the gasoline container go into the box, then Leonard kicked the door shut with his big black boot.
There was a sound in the belly of the firebox like a huge piece of ordnance going off. The furnace pipes jumped, the walls shook, and dust rained down in a noxious snowfall on their baseball caps.
“Jeez!” said Chuck, an I-told-you-so look on his face mixed with raw terror, “you ain’t no explosives expert neither!”
Robideau heard a sharp bang and the door of the chute burst open, striking Overberg under the shoulder blades, driving him forward on a blast of expanding gasses and black soot straight into the chief’s arms. The chief dropped the bar, snatched the gun away, spun Overberg around, and hustled him out of the room.
“So you never did find that poor girl — I knew you wouldn’t.”
Robideau glanced up from his paperwork, miffed.
“I found out what happened to her. Doesn’t that count?”
Mrs. Robideau gave a grudging sigh.
“Oh, I imagine it does. In a way. But what I had in mind, you’d bring the girl back, all smiling.”
“She won’t be smiling, ever again. Teddy Tozer saw to that. But then Teddy won’t be smiling either, compliments of Roald Overberg, so there’s some justice to it, I suppose.”
“And you figure Overberg will get ten years? If that’s justice, you can keep it!”
“Well, he didn’t kill the girl — not directly. And a jury may buy his self-defense argument after they hear about Tozer’s history and view what we pulled out of the furnace grate.”
“That pewter bracelet.”
The chief nodded. He added, uncomfortably, “And... a few other things.”
“He should get life!”
“He will. He’s in his seventies.”
Mrs. Robideau was not mollified. “They could stick a few more years on him if they tried. What about those bylaws he broke? They should be good for an extra six months. I mean, what’s the good of having bylaws if you’re only going to use them against ordinary citizens?”
“I don’t make the laws, I only enforce them.” Robideau set down his pen. “At the risk of quoting Leonard Boski, I just work here.”
“Is that what you call it?”
He looked at her. “You do tease me unmercifully, don’t you?”