She went into a fancy grocery store, and Arnie followed her. He picked up a basket and began idly dropping things into it, watching her as she moved through the aisles. She spent most of her time at the deli counter, buying a big chunk of smoked salmon, a small tin of very expensive caviar, and some cheeses, testing them for ripeness. She picked up a bunch of fresh flowers and, finally, a bottle of very good domestic champagne. Somehow, Arnie didn’t think she was planning supper alone at home. He put down his basket and ducked out of the store as she stopped at the checkout counter.
A few minutes later, she came out and headed uptown, carrying a shopping bag in one hand and her purse and the flowers in the other. Arnie followed, half a block behind her. He was right in the middle of the 19th Precinct, his old beat, and he knew virtually every shop and restaurant along the way. He was enjoying the walk.
Then something peculiar happened: the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. It used to happen when he was in a dangerous situation, when he was hyperalert, going down a dark alley after somebody with a knife, that sort of thing. Now it was happening for no apparent reason.
Martha stopped at a corner for a traffic light, and Arnie turned toward the window of an antique shop, apparently studying its contents. With little visible motion of his head, he checked down the street in the direction from which he had come. He had the odd feeling that he was being followed.
The streets were busy, lots of people on the way home from work, many of them with briefcases or groceries. He could detect no one who made him suspicious. Normally, if he had thought he were being followed, he would have checked the other side of the street as well, but he dismissed the notion from his mind. He remembered an occasion, many years ago, when he had been followed, on Second Avenue, right around here. Some part of his brain must have reacted to that memory.
The light changed, and Martha continued uptown, turning east down a street in the low Nineties. Arnie crossed the street and followed her down the other side, continuing when she stopped at a building. He saw her open a wrought-iron gate and disappear down a flight of steps to what must have been an outside door to the basement. He crossed the street, walked to the building, and looked down the stairwell, just in time to see her entering the apartment, stopping on the threshold, apparently to give someone a kiss. He couldn’t see who it was. The door closed, and Arnie was left standing on the sidewalk, frustrated.
He walked up the front steps of the building and checked the mailboxes; the one for the basement apartment was marked DRYER. Arnie stood on the stoop and looked up and down the street. It looked as though Martha was there for dinner, at the very least, and while it wasn’t his own dinner-time yet, he had no great wish to spend the next two or three hours standing in the cold outside this building waiting for Martha to come out, especially since he wasn’t being paid to do so. Even if he did wait, what would he accomplish? What he wanted to know was, who was Dryer, and what were they talking about in that apartment?
Arnie walked down the steps, tipping his hat to a middle-aged woman who was on her way up, and at the bottom turned right. There was a narrow alley beside the building, and he walked down it, hoping there might be a window opening into the basement apartment that he could see through. He found nothing but a solid brick wall.
Still, basement apartments often had gardens, didn’t they? He took out a penlight and shone it down the alley; it stopped at a brick wall another forty feet along. He walked on down the alley until the brick changed to a concrete block wall, which went up only a couple of feet higher than his head. The wall seemed to separate him from a garden, and there would be windows on the other side of it.
Arnie found an empty garbage can with a lid and carried it over to the wall. He steadied himself against the concrete blocks and tried to step up on top of the can, but it was too big a step for him. A few years ago, he’d have had no problem doing that, but now… Using his penlight, he found a wooden box full of excelsior down the alley. He carried it back and placed it next to the garbage can; it made a nice step up.
Arnie stepped onto the box and, grabbing the top of the wall with his fingers, stepped up onto the garbage can. He was head and shoulders above the top of the wall now, and he could see a row of glowing windows on the back of the building, with shadows moving across them. Must be the kitchen, Martha and her friend, Dryer, would be preparing the things she had brought from the grocery.
Arnie figured that, in spite of his years, he could hoist himself to the top of the wall and down the other side, so he could look through the windows. He was about to try this when the hairs on the back of his neck began moving around again. Then there was a tug on the tail of his raincoat, and, alarmed, he turned around to see who was there.
“What the fuck…” he managed to say aloud, before he began to fall off the garbage can.
Chapter 21
Stone worked late on a memo advising a Woodman & Weld client how to handle a drunk driving charge for an employee’s wife. It was nearly eight when he had finished the memo and faxed it to Bill Eggers, and he had just turned out his office light when the phone rang. He switched the light on again and picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“Stone, it’s Dino.”
“Hi, Dino.”
“Can you meet me at Elaine’s in half an hour?”
“Sure.”
“Good.” The detective lieutenant hung up.
Dino could be curt when under pressure, Stone remembered; he wondered what was going on. He felt grungy, so he had a quick shower and changed into some casual clothes before leaving the house and hailing a cab uptown.
Dino was already at a table along the right wall when Stone entered, and he looked grim. Stone’s immediate thought was wife or father-in-law trouble, but he was wrong. He sat down, ordered a bourbon, and looked at his former partner. “So, what’s going on? You look a little down.”
Dino nodded. “Down is a good word for it. Somebody wasted Arnie Millman around six this evening.”
Stone stared at Dino. “Jesus, I saw him only this morning.”
“Not since then?”
“No, not since nine-thirty, ten, I guess. This is terrible; has somebody called his wife?”
“I drew that duty,” Dino said glumly. “I sent a policewoman out there to be with her until some family could be rounded up.”
“What happened, Dino?”
“Was he working on something for you?”
“No.”
“Stone, your check for sixteen hundred bucks was in his pocket.”
“He was working on something; we finished up this morning, and I paid him.”
“Any loose ends?”
Stone thought about Martha, but dismissed the idea. “No; he checked two people out for me, gave me his report this morning, and that was it.”
“Anything about these two people that could have hurt Arnie?”
Stone shook his head. “It was a straightforward surveillance, a background check. Both people were no problem to my client, so that was it.”
“Any chance either of them could have known Arnie was following them?”
“You know Arnie better than that, Dino; he was good.”
“Yeah.” Dino opened his notebook and showed Stone an address in the low Nineties. “That address mean anything to you?”
Stone shook his head again.
“Yeah. You sure this address doesn’t match up with either of your people?”
“Absolutely; one lives in the West Fifties, the other in the East Village. Who lives there?”
“My guys talked with all the tenants, but nobody admitted knowing Arnie or anything about him. One woman saw him coming down the front steps as she was going up; that was about five-forty-five. Arnie bought it in an alley beside the building shortly after that.”