TWENTY MINUTES was not soon enough. I was pacing by the elevator when the door slid open and Rittle stepped out onto the worn carpet, looking as nervous as I felt. I jumped on him. “What’s going on? Where’s Ada?”
The soft brown eyes behind his glasses blinked up at me in puzzlement. “She’s in New York, isn’t she?”
“Oh … yeah.”
“She’s taking a late flight back, I thought.”
“So what’s this about?”
“Well, I saw the note and—”
“Note?”
“Yeah … sorry.”
It was a sitcom script. We were on different pages together. “What note?” I said.
“The stickum you left on Ada’s desk. I looked at the photograph.”
I relaxed a little; he wasn’t here about Ada.
“Alex,” he said, “I think I may have seen him.”
“Khoy?”
“Is that his name?”
“Yes. Where’d you see him?”
He rubbed at his arms, bare in the blue Izod shirt he had on. “Here in town, yesterday. I couldn’t talk freely back in the office just now, on account of client confidentiality.” He glanced toward the lawyer’s door where a murmur of voices was coming through. I motioned him through my waiting room into my office, gestured to a chair and took my own.
“Has Khoy been a client?” I asked.
“No, no. I’d never seen him before yesterday. I was visiting a family over on Broadway. I think I passed him in a tenement stairway, just for a moment. He was going upstairs. I didn’t think twice on it, but when I saw your photograph…”
I took another copy out of the batch Bob Whitaker had given me. “Is that him?”
Rittle studied the picture, angling it to catch the sunlight. He adjusted his glasses and breathed in and out deliberately through his nose several times. “The staircase was dim. But when you’ve worked with people a long time, you notice a lot of particularity in them. I got so’s I used to see it with the Montagnards in Nam. I see it now with Cambodians.” He touched the glossy face. “The eyes are similar. The shape of the face. I’m pretty sure. Though the person I saw looks older.”
“He’d be close to four years older than that,” I said.
“He was … harder too. Toughened. What’s he done?”
I hesitated; but Rittle had come to me voluntarily. I owed him. “He might’ve murdered several people, including Bhuntan Tran.”
“Jeezum.”
“Yeah.”
He swallowed, took another peek at the photo, then set it on the desk. “Shouldn’t we go to the police?”
I found myself wishing I had spoken to St. Onge. “If the person you saw isn’t him, how do you think he and the other people there will take a lot of cops in riot guns and flak vests?”
Walt was rubbing again at his arms, lightly freckled under the sandy hair. “I wish I could be more certain, but I had just that one glance as he went up the stairs.”
“What’s up there?” I asked.
“Apartment, I guess.”
If it was Khoy, he would have to know he was being sought. Maybe he was already gone. “Can you show me the building?”
As Rittle went out to get the elevator, I stayed behind a moment. I unlocked the bottom drawer of my file cabinet and got out the Masterpiece. The walnut grips smelled faintly of linseed oil. I swung the cylinder open and checked the full load, then slipped the .38 into the side pocket of my jacket. It was not the best way to carry, but I did not want to advertise to Rittle by taking time for the holster.
We took Walt’s pickup, a little blue Isuzu with a trailer hitch with a faded yellow tennis ball over the ball tow. The cab was air-conditioned, but I felt myself sweating. On Broadway we drove past wooden tenements with clotheslines running across the porches, flapping sheets and tube socks and Day-Glo shirts. He indicated a door and drove beyond and parked. The place was a sagging multi-unit done in a faded gray that would chalk off on your eyeballs if you looked too long. Someone had ripped an ancient heating system out of one of the basements, leaving ducts and casings heaped at the curb like a body pile after a robot war.
“You want to wait here?” I said.
Walt’s Adam’s apple bobbled like a soft-boiled egg. “I reckon I’ll have to show you.”
On the scabbing clapboards outside the door was an array of mailboxes, each with a little padlock attached to keep the welfare checks from walking. The security lock on the door looked like it had quit the first time the cops knocked with a sledgehammer. The door swung into a dingy hall lit only by the plank of daylight that fell through the open doorway. I shut the door, and we let our eyes adjust, the ragged wainscoting and graffiti on the walls coming slowly into view. We did not have to wait for the smell. It was an amalgam of garbage, dry rot, grungy carpet, and Third World cuisine. I looked at Rittle, and he pointed. “Fourth floor,” he said quietly.
“Last chance,” I said.
He drew a deep breath. “I’ve got to satisfy myself now.”
I led. From behind doors on the landings came music and raised voices, none of it in languages I wanted to know. Starting on the second floor, there were dim lights in overhead fixtures filled with the husks of fossil bugs. On the third floor I began noticing the little embossed plastic strips. PLEASE SHUT THE DOWNSTAIRS DOOR, and NO RUBBISH IN HALLWAY.
“This is where I passed him,” Rittle said. “He went up there.”
We climbed the final flight of steps. NO BICYCLES OR SHOPPING CARTS ON LANDINGS, advised another strip. The landlord must have got a tape writer with his tax refund check; he definitely wasn’t going broke on building maintenance. Rittle showed me a door, battered wood like the others, with a stick-on number 12 on it. Piled next to the wall just beyond it were several collapsible cardboard inserts of the kind that come in wine cartons.
“Must’ve been a party,” Rittle whispered.
“There’d be bottles,” I whispered back; it was catching. “Where’s the first place you go to get empty boxes?”
“Oh, yeah. Then somebody moved?”
“Looks like it.” I laid my ear to the closed door. No sounds came from the other side. Reaching into my pocket and fitting my hand to the walnut grip of the Masterpiece, I put the other hand to work knocking. Behind me Rittle was doing a nervous little dance.
Surprise! There was no response.
That business on TV about jiggling a safety pin in the lock and “open sesame!” is a crock. Most decent locks are resistant to anyone but a locksmith, or a man with a hammer. I was neither. This lock felt like a deadbolt.
“Maybe the landlord lives in the building,” Rittle said.
“Don’t make jokes.”
There was a gap under the door you could have rolled a baseball through. As I tried to figure a way to make it work, Walt got down on the cigarette-burned linoleum and peered under.
“Hey, Alex—got a pen?”
I gave him one, and he used it to slide out a key. I used the key on the lock.
“And I wanted you to stay in the car,” I said.
He gave a shaky smile.
The apartment was stifling, and vacant—newly vacant, I judged. I didn’t break my neck looking for the last month’s rent or a forwarding address.
PLEASE TURN OFF LITES WHEN NOT IN USE, a sign urged. I used them. The place had a few sticks of furniture, the kind acquired by getting out ahead of the city rubbish fleet. We walked through four box-like rooms, moving slowly, but in the heat it was enough to have our sweat plopping onto the linoleum. The dripping sound I started hearing, though, was coming from the bathroom.
A stained plastic shower curtain was drawn across the tub. Too many scenes from movies flickered through my mind. Rittle must have seen the same movies. We exchanged a look. He stepped back, and I yanked the curtain aside.
We gazed into an empty tub, scummed like the hull of a boat in Boston Harbor. Drip … drip … drip said the faucet. DO NOT THROW OBJECTS IN TOYLET, said a sign. “Whew,” said Walt Rittle.
In the kitchen I gave up and opened a window. Whoever had lived in the apartment last had never really settled in. There was scant sign of life at all if you didn’t notice the dried seeds of rice and a few petrified bean sprouts that the roaches had not carried off. In a straw wastebasket I pulled out from under the sink, there was a copy of yesterday’s Sun. It was folded-open to the account of the Castle funeral. Rittle looked at it over my shoulder. “Isn’t that the guy who was killed in his house in Andover?”
“Shot in the back of the head. Like Tran.”
“Jeezum.”
The news set Rittle dancing again, watching the door, eager to be gone. I stood by the sink, figuring. We could learn where the landlord was, get hold of him and find out who his late tenant had been; but there was little chance the name would be Khoy. If he had in fact been here, had killed those others in Texas and California, he would be five aliases away now. Suppositions. John Potter had linked the victims for me, but there was still no clear evidence or motive to tie the killings together. Those could come later. As we stood there, burning gray matter, someone was laying down tracks. I needed to find out who.
There was nothing else in the wastebasket but some dust and a shiny strand of metallic cellophane. We locked the unit and pushed the key back under the door. Two floors down I got Rittle to knock on the door of the apartment belonging to his welfare client. A very dark man wearing a red, black and green knitted hat answered. He recognized Rittle and flashed a smile. “Mr. Walt,” he said in an accent that explained the hat and the ebony skin, “do come in.”
Rittle addressed the man as Joseph, said I was his colleague, and asked if I could use the telephone. Joseph seemed honored by the request. He led me in past a smiling family lineup.
St. Onge was not in. I asked the desk officer his name. Patrolman McGroarty. It rang no bells, and I hoped mine didn’t either. Very briefly I urged him to notify the state police to put on an alert at Logan Airport and the train and bus stations for Suoheang Khoy. I told him there was an outstanding California warrant on Khoy for parole violation—just to give paper weight to my request—then added what I suspected Khoy of having done and gave the best description I could manage. McGroarty took the information without a lot of nuisance questions.
When we got into the hallway, Rittle said, “Joseph claims the man who rented unit twelve was Asian. He was there less than a month. It was news to Joseph the guy had moved out.”
Downstairs in the foyer of the building something on the carpet winked in the sunlight as we opened the door, and I stooped and picked up a strand of cellophane tinsel. I glanced back up the stairway, thinking about icicles in July.