He crossed to the far side of the hallway and aimed at the deadbolt. This part was fun-the way the gun made a little zipping sound and the door exploded inward. As far as the chain.
He took a few steps, shoulder down, across the hallway and hit the door with his shoulder; the chain gave way like so much tinsel.
Bram Smyth and, he guessed, Sally were halfway out of their dinner seats, staring at the doorway, at him. He realized he still had the gun in his hand. “Bram, goddammit,” he said. He started unscrewing the silencer.
Smyth looked like what he was-a Yuppie stockbroker. He still had his tie on, his tasseled moccasins.
“Did we have an appointment or what?”
Bram looked at the woman, put on a sick smile. “Hey, was that today? I thought it was tomorrow. I’m sorry, I got the-”
Johnny shook his head. “You didn’t hear the doorbell? I come up here and knock?”
Bram motioned ambiguously. “Johnny. We’re having a romantic dinner here. Were.”
Anotfier smile at his wife. Everything was under control, he was telling her, the fucking wimp, except somebody just shot my door off.
“Sometimes you don’t let yourself get interrupted.” He held his hands up. “Bad timing, I guess. Right?”
Johnny glanced at the woman, who had sat back down and was sipping white wine with her legs crossed. She was doing okay, trying to go with it, but her hands were shaking.
Elaborately, Johnny put the gun back in his holster. He nodded at Sally, smiled at Bram. “Excuse us, would you? Bram, you mind we talk a second in the hallway?”
They were on the rug, the shattered door pulled behind them.
“I’ll have it tomorrow,” Smyth said. “I thought it was tomorrow, Johnny, swear to God.”
“Eight hundred tomorrow.”
Smyth’s eyes widened. “Johnny, it’s four.”
Johnny shook his head. “How long you been paying on Thursdays now? Four months? Five? You’re into next week’s vig.”
The guy was going to pee on his nice suit in about two minutes. “Look, the stock business, Johnny, it’s up and down. I mean one week I’m golden and the next I’m flat. You know?”
Johnny held up a hand. “You needed money. Mr Tortoni, out of the goodness of his heart, helped you out and the deal was you pay him back any time you want, but until you do, you go the vig, capisce?”
Smyth hung his head. “Yeah. Tell him I’m sorry. Tomorrow, okay.”
“Okay.” Johnny stuck out his hand. “Your door’s broken,” he said. “You might want to call the maintenance people.”
Smyth looked at Johnny’s extended hand.
Johnny smiled. “What? I’m gonna break your arm?”
Smyth let out a breath and smiled, taking Johnny’s hand.
Johnny gripped tight and brought his left hand down across the arm at the elbow, hearing the crack as Bram Smyth crumpled to the ground. He looked up at Johnny, holding his broken wing, tears streaming down his face.
“Eight hundred,” Johnny said. “Tomorrow.”
Glitsky kept telling himself that he wasn’t doing this for the money. Still, the fact that he wasn’t going to get any overtime made a difference. Ray Weir, the murdered woman’s husband, hadn’t been home in the afternoon. Many working men weren’t. So Abe killed the rest of the day at the Youth Guidance Center, interviewing a potential witness to another killing. The boy, a seventeen-year-old Puerto Rican kid, improbably named Guadalupe Watson, was not a big talker. A friend of Guadalupe had put him at the curb in front of Rita Salcedo’s house when her husband Jose chased her outside and shot her in the back as she ran from him.
But if Guadalupe had been there, he didn’t remember it.
The lack of cooperation didn’t exactly roll off Glitsky’s back, in spite of the fact that it happened all the time. Some people didn’t want to talk to cops-ever, about anything. It could only come back and get you.
So Abe had talked and talked and waited and listened to a seemingly endless succession of yes and no, Guadalupe answering only what was asked, volunteering nothing, and in all probability lying when he did manage to mumble out a syllable.
Then it was five o’clock, or close enough to it, so he’d gone home, had dinner with Flo and the kids and now was walking up the steps leading to Ray Weir’s house, thinking about overtime, more or less. Or none.
The front door opened on a small lobby. To Abe’s left a stairway led to the upper flat of the duplex. On the wall by the stairs was a logo of an old-fashioned tripod motion-picture camera with the name Weir inside. He climbed the stairs and stood at the small landing for a moment, waiting again, listening again. Sometimes you heard things.
This wasn’t one of those times. He pushed the button by the door, didn’t hear a bell ring, then knocked.
The door opened on a man who looked like nobody, or anybody. As Glitsky introduced himself and produced his identification, he tried to get a physical handle on him.
Ray Weir was the guy you opened your checking account with at the bank, the mid-level manager in a cheap gray suit who rode in the elevator with you, your buddy’s cousin from, say, Nebraska. He had light brown hair, regular features. Neither skinny nor fat, short nor tall. A quiet, nice-guy loner type who one day might find himself walking into a tower carrying an automatic weapon.
“Is this an official call?” he asked.
Glitsky wasn’t sure what that meant. “Well, I’m officially investigating your wife’s murder, if that’s what you mean.”
“You might as well come in,” he said.
Glitsky, checking in after dinner, had found out that they had located Ray from some information that had been in Maxine Weir’s wallet. A couple of blues had caught up with him at work and informed him of Maxine’s death. Now he seemed resigned, lost, and immediately asked Glitsky if he was a suspect.
“Why?” Glitsky, crossing the living room, thought he might as well go for it. “Did you kill her?”
He sat on a floral couch, motioned Abe to an easy chair. “No, but I mean, you know, with being separated…”
“Did you want to kill her?”
He looked someplace over Glitsky’s shoulder, focusing on something so intently that Abe turned around. The wall behind him was nearly covered with eight-by-ten glossies of a beautiful woman. Glitsky stood up and walked over for a better look. Some of the pictures had the name Maxine Weir on them, and Abe tried to reconcile this stunning face with the woman he had found in a neck brace on Ingraham’s barge that morning. He could not do it.
Ray had come up behind him.
“I wanted her to come back. I didn’t want her dead.”
“How about her boyfriend?”
“Him I wanted dead.”
“But you didn’t kill him?”
Ray’s eyes went back to the pictures. “Seven years.” He shook his head. “You know what it’s like to be with someone that beautiful when she’s in love with you? It’s like nothing else. You walk in a room and you’re the proudest man there. It doesn’t really make too much difference what else is going on in your life. I mean, my scripts. So nobody wants them. At least I’ve got Maxine, I’m worth something. You know?”
Glitsky didn’t much buy the line. His wife, Flo, was a fine-looking woman, but he sure didn’t define himself by what other people thought of her. He also noticed that Ray didn’t deny killing Rusty Ingraham. On the other hand, Rusty wasn’t officially dead yet, so he said, “Were you separated a long time?”
“Five months, eleven days today.”
Glitsky kept coming back to the pictures. There were several nudes, tasteful, also erotic. She hadn’t looked the same this morning with bullet holes in her.
“How did she get with Ingraham?”
He tried to laugh, but it didn’t come out right. “That was pathetic. You had to know her.”
“I’m trying to,” Glitsky said.
They were back sitting down. Ray was smoking an unfiltered Camel. Glitsky saw another cigarette butt with lipstick on it in the ashtray. “Pathetic, how?” he asked.