“How?”
“Small-caliber handgun, looks like. He took two in the head. It wouldn’t have made much noise.”
“Robbery, maybe?”
“Maybe. They took his gun; I remember Arnie using the old standard Smith & Wesson thirty-eight, two-inch barrel. His wallet was beside him and the money was gone, but who knows? That could have been window dressing.”
“Look, Arnie wasn’t the sort of guy to attract a pro hit. He worked Robbery for most of his career, never had anything to do with the wiseguys.”
“I know, I know.”
“It just doesn’t make any sense.”
“What was he working on for you?”
“Are we off the record here, Dino?”
“Sure, it’s just between you and me.”
“You remember that DIRT thing. He was checking out two of Amanda Dart’s employees; both of them came up clean. It isn’t the sort of business to end up with a shooting like this one. It’s all ego, vanity.”
“Two good motives for murder.”
“Not in this case. Neither employee had any thought of being followed by Arnie; he’d have known it if they did. There’s only one other employee, and I didn’t assign Arnie to her; I was going to check her out myself, if it came to that. I don’t think it will.”
“Where does that employee live?”
“ Third Avenue in the Sixties.”
“Nowhere near, then.”
“No. She’s a secretary; not the type to shoot a retired cop.”
“I’ll take your word.”
“When do you get the ME’s report?”
“He’s working on Arnie’s body now; he’ll call me here when he’s finished.”
“No witnesses, of course.”
“None. Like I said, it wouldn’t have made much noise, wouldn’t have attracted any attention unless somebody had been walking right by the alley at the very moment.”
“And nobody was?”
“Nope. Let’s have some dinner while we wait for the ME to call.” He signaled a waiter for a menu.
They ate in glum silence. It was a ritual with them; in the circumstances they were either supposed to talk about Arnie, or not at all. Stone tried to remember some anecdote or other about Arnie, but he couldn’t. “Funny,” he said after a while, “all I can remember about him in the squad room is he never took his overcoat off in winter. He’d sit there in his coat with the steam heat going and type arrest reports.”
“He had some good busts,” Dino said. “I never partnered with him, but I remember he had a reputation for being tenacious, for not giving up on a case, for going the extra mile in an investigation.”
“I knew that, I guess. That’s why, when he called me for work – this was three, four years ago – I gave it to him when I could. He was reliable, he had a good nose. That’s why I don’t think either of the people he was working on for me could have been involved. Arnie would have smelled something. Do you think this could connect to some old case of his?”
“What, fifteen years after he retired? I can’t buy that.”
The pay phone on the wall rang, and they both stopped eating and watched a waiter answer it. He waved Dino over.
The conversation lasted less than a minute, and Dino’s expression never changed. He came back and sat down.
“What’s the news?”
“Like I thought, two shots, small caliber – a twenty-five automatic.”
“Don’t see many of those anymore.”
“Yeah, these days every punk on the street has a Glock or something better. There was an abrasion on Arnie’s left knee, too, like he fell down, but no marks to show that somebody hit him first.”
“Where’d he take the bullets?”
“Left temple and back of the head.”
“An execution, then. Well, I suppose it could have been some junkie with some trash piece he’d copped in a burglary. He sees Arnie, an old guy, easy mark, and he’s desperate enough to pop him, even for just a few bucks.”
“He didn’t take your check,” Dino said.
“Where was it, in the wallet?”
Dino shook his head. “Left inside jacket pocket. The guy went for the cash, didn’t worry about the rest. Arnie was wearing a Rolex we chipped in for when he put in his papers.”
“I remember that,” Stone said. “I bought a piece of that watch. The guy didn’t take that?”
Dino shook his head. “This doesn’t look good for clearing.”
“Pull in your snitches, put the word out on the street. The twenty-five handgun is something, at least. Not a lot of them on the street, I’ll bet.”
“Oh, we’ll treat it as a cop killing, which means all the stops out,” Dino said. “I’m just not optimistic.”
“Maybe you’ll get lucky.”
“Funny,” Dino said, playing with his food. “I don’t feel lucky today.”
Chapter 22
Stone said good-bye to Dino on the sidewalk, declined a lift home, and walked up Second Avenue. He turned right in the low Nineties and found the building. There was nothing in particular to distinguish it from any of the other houses on the street. Most of them looked better now than they had when he was working out of the 19th; gentrification had had its way with the block.
The alley was dark, and he used a pocket flashlight that had been part of his wardrobe since his first day as a detective nearly twenty years before. There didn’t seem to be much reason for the alley – it was a dead-ender, and neither of the adjacent buildings had a door opening onto it. At the back, after the buildings ended, there was a wall on either side of the alley, affording some privacy to the gardens at the rear of the houses. Stone’s light fell on a garbage can and a wooden box.
It was a funny place for a garbage can, not near a back door, where it might be used, or the street, where it might be emptied. He turned and looked back toward the street. Half a dozen other cans rested there. Why was this one at the opposite end of the alley? Certainly, no New York City garbage collector was going to walk the few extra yards to pick it up.
Stone stepped onto the box, then onto the garbage can, and looked over the wall. Small garden, untended, dark windows at the back of the building. Could Arnie have been interested in those windows? He remembered that the old detective had used a cup microphone on one of the other two surveillances. He looked up and saw a fire escape disappearing upward into the darkness. If he stood on top of the wall and jumped, he could make the fire escape. Was Arnie contemplating that? The idea seemed preposterous for a man of his years; his even going over the wall seemed unlikely.
Stone hopped down, then remembered that the Medical Examiner had said that Arnie’s body had had an abrasion on a knee. Could he have gotten that jumping or falling from the garbage can? He played the light around once more, hoping for something that the cops had overlooked, but there was nothing.
He walked back to the front of the building and put his light on the mailboxes; none of the names sounded at all familiar. He wrote them down for future reference, then walked back down the steps to the street. He looked over the iron railing at the basement apartment; a dim light glowed behind the windows. That apartment would own the garden out back. He walked down the stairs and rang the bell, waited, then rang it again.
The door opened the length of the security chain and a young man, half in silhouette, looked back at him. Six feet, a hundred and eighty, hair on the short side, wearing only a pair of faded jeans; Stone registered all this automatically. He checked his notebook for the name. “Mr. Dryer?” he asked, flashing his badge. His ID had RETIRED stamped on it, but the badge didn’t.
“Yeah?”
“Mind if I come in? It’s about what happened here tonight.”
“I’ve already answered all the questions I’m going to,” the young man said. “What is this, anyway? It’s after eleven.”
“Sorry to inconvenience you; there are just a few more questions. I don’t have to come in; you can answer them right here.”