"Cold Day in Hell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Richard)

11

THE FRIENDS MEETING that Robin had attended was at the old Quaker meetinghouse on the edge of Stuyvesant Park, off East Fifteenth Street. Technically, the park wasn’t named for Peter Stuyvesant, early Manhattan ’s first director general, but for his wife, Judith. It would have rankled old Pete to see anything other than a Dutch Reformed church built on land that was originally part of the Stuyvesant homestead, but the Quakers had wisely waited until 189 years after the Dutchman’s death before building their house of worship, so they were spared the pugnacious peg leg’s fabled wrath.

The meeting room was a large rectangle capable of holding several hundred people. It was arranged with rows of pews facing the center of the room. A photograph of Robin Burrell was taped in the middle of one of the front pews. The photograph was black and white, a solemn posed shot dominated by Robin’s dark eyes. Painful to look at, difficult to turn away from. I took a seat in the pew opposite. As others came into the meetinghouse and took their seats, they folded their hands on their laps and closed their eyes for several minutes. At some point I attempted to follow suit-when in Rome -but an afterimage of Robin’s face from the photograph sizzled in the darkness, and I opened my eyes.

Quaker meetings are as much about silence as they are about talk. Maybe more about silence. At no signal that I could discern, the gentle shuffling and settling in were dispensed with and a stillness settled over the room. The meeting had commenced. There were close to a hundred people attending. Some remained with their eyes closed, but just as many sat with eyes open, gazing down at the floor or off into the middle distance.

After maybe ten minutes of the silence, a man rose to his feet. I placed him in his mid-thirties, with tortoiseshell glasses, a clipped brown mustache and a plaid sweater vest. His hands were clasped in front of him, and he rotated his head slowly as he spoke, taking in the room. The voice was soothing, smooth as butter.

“I’m struck by the affection for Robin that I am feeling here this morning. The enormous…affection.” Here he paused to make eye contact. Slowly. Methodically. Person by person. He continued, “I’m struck with the thought that under different circumstances, if another of us had passed on, Robin would have been here this morning, participating. Robin’s affection, her sense of concern, her caring, they would all be here in the air, just as our thoughts and concerns for her are now passing among us. I’m struck by that thought. What I’m struck by is not so much Robin’s absence but her presence. It’s in this way that I feel Robin is still very much with us. We think of her, as we are all doing this morning, and she is alive to us. The affection and the concern that Robin showed for all of us while she was still among us-that’s what I still feel. That Robin hasn’t died. And I suppose I’m hoping that in some way, maybe in this way, through us, Robin can continue to live on.”

He scanned the room again then sat back down and bowed his head. Seated next to him was a young Asian American woman with tears flowing freely down her cheeks. A minute later, a large, fleshy, red-haired woman got to her feet and cleared her throat. “Robin used to always ask me how Pepper was doing. Some of you know Pepper got hit by a taxi in August. You can still tell when I take him out for his walks. His hips aren’t right anymore. He walks funny. It was the best they could do at the hospital. I mean the animal hospital. Anyway, um, Robin, she always asked about him. It was real…It was nice of her.”

She began to blush, and she sat back down. Only a few seconds passed before another person stood up and muttered a few sentences about God knowing more than we do. Others followed. Most of the messages were brief. A thought. An aphorism. A prayer. One middle-aged man stood up and started to tell a story about him and Robin rushing around the neighborhood getting donuts before one of the meetings. There didn’t seem any real point to the story, and midway through it, the man’s voice cracked and he sat back down.

A long silence followed, and I found myself-as I’m sure others were doing-staring once more at the photograph taped onto the pew. I didn’t want it to happen, but as I sat looking at the picture, the crime-scene photographs I’d seen in Joe Gallo’s office-the cruel, garish, mindless damage-shimmered into focus in my head, interfering with the simple solemn face in front of me. Sometimes I hate my job.

At the conclusion of the meeting, a coffee-and-pastries reception was held in a small gymnasium in the adjoining building. The red-haired woman who had spoken about her dog was standing behind one of the folding tables, feeding pastries onto several plastic trays. As I took one of the Styrofoam cups of coffee, she gave me a sugary smile.

“Hello. I don’t know you. Are you new to meeting?”

“I’m…Yes. This is my first time.”

“First time at all or first time here?”

“First time at all.”

She asked, “Were you a friend of Robin’s? We expected some of her friends might show up this morning.”

“I knew her, yes,” I said.

She shook her head sadly. “Isn’t it awful? I just can’t believe she’s gone.”

An elderly couple angled in for some pastries, and I moved over to give them room.

“What about you?” I asked. “Did you know Robin well?”

“Me? Not really. I mean, not outside of meeting or anything. There was one time Robin and I did end up at the same brunch afterward. But, you know. By coincidence.”

I indicated the people milling about. “What about some of the other people? She must have had some close friends here?”

The woman smiled again. “We’re all close Friends.”

I got her meaning. “Right. Of course. I don’t mean strictly in the Quaker sense.”

Other people were coming in for the sweets and coffee. I was still blocking access, so I slipped around behind the table. The red-haired woman handed me a box of pastries. “You just volunteered. I’m Martha, by the way.”

“Fritz.”

I laid out the pastries on one of the plastic trays just as a large lumpish man came by. He moved like a lava flow, nabbing three pastries at once and continuing on without a word. “Lots of people here were very fond of Robin,” Martha continued. “I guess you could tell that. The community really rallied around her when all that horrible trial stuff began happening. Except we didn’t see a lot of Robin during most of that. She wasn’t going out much, it was too big a hassle for her. The way she was being hounded. But we’d get word how she was doing from Edward.”

“Edward?”

“He’s the elder who spoke about Robin in meeting.”

“The guy with the mustache?”

“Yes.”

I scanned the crowd and found the man in question standing in conversation with the Asian American woman who’d been crying off and on during the meeting. Another man was standing just behind them, leaning against the wall with his thumbs hooked into the belt loops of his faded jeans, as if hoping to be mistaken for James Dean. He was about my height and build, with longish stringy blond hair, a narrow nose and a noticeably small mouth. There was a slightly rodentlike quality to his face, and he appeared to be following the conversation closely, though I couldn’t tell if he was part of it or merely eavesdropping. The man named Edward was impassioned, punctuating his words by slapping the back of one hand down into the other, over and over.

“You say he’s an elder?” I asked Martha. “Obviously you’re not talking about his age. Does that mean he’s a muckety-muck in the Quaker hierarchy?”

She laughed. “I guess you could put it that way. Edward is one of our leaders. We call them elders.”

“And you’re saying that he stayed in touch with Robin while she was going through her difficulties?”

“We’re a community. We’re a family. That’s part of the role of the elders, to be available to members of the family who are in distress.”

“Does Edward have a last name?”

“Well, of course he does. It’s Anger.” I gave her a look. “No, I’m serious. That’s his name.”

“Ed Anger?”

“Edward Anger. You say it enough times, it sounds completely normal.”

I looked over again at Edward Anger. He’d taken the young woman’s hands between his. “Who’s the woman?”

“Oh, that’s Michelle,” Martha said. “Michelle Poole. She’s a friend of Robin’s.”

Edward Anger released the woman’s hands and steered himself into the crowd. I turned to Martha. “Permission to unvolunteer.”

She gave me a peculiar look, then laughed. “Oh. Sure. Thank you for helping. It was nice meeting you, Fritz.”

“Same.” I swung around from behind the table and made my way across the room. The rat-faced James Dean was on his way to the food table. Our shoulders bumped by accident, but only one of us murmured, “Sorry.” Not him.

I stepped over to Robin’s friend. “Michelle?”

“Yes?”

“Hi. My name is Fritz,” I said. “I understand you were a friend of Robin’s.”

Her face could have been a piece of porcelain. Not a blemish to be found. Her jet-black hair was cut in one of those forever-mussed styles-in Michelle’s case, an “I might look like I just rolled out of bed but don’t I look great” look. Her eyes were quite large, particularly for a person of Asian extraction, her mouth was small, her cheeks liable to cause riots among women of weaker bones. She was wearing a stylishly ripped T-shirt, one side way down off the shoulder, over a black leotard and a pair of faded blue jeans that might as well have been wrapped around two pipes as a pair of human legs.

She eyed me with caution. “Yes.”

“I was wondering if we could talk.”

The caution melded into clear suspicion. “About Robin?”

“I’m a private investigator. I’m looking into what happened to Robin. It would be wonderful if-”

She interrupted me. “I know who you are.”

“You do?”

“You’re the detective. You live across the street from Robin’s.”

“I don’t actually live there.”

“But it’s you. Robin talked about you a lot. She said you were a real calming influence. That’s a quote.”

I asked, “Could we sit somewhere?”

“Sure.”

I followed her over to a bench near the door, and we took a seat. She crossed one pipe over the other and shifted around to face me.

“Yeah. She liked you. I mean, this whole past year it’s like everyone was always trying to get a piece of her. First that asshole Fox, then all the magazine and TV people. Those creeps who were calling her up and writing to her. Who could blame her for getting all paranoid about people? All Robin wanted to do was crawl into her bed and put her head under the pillow. She said you seemed different. Like you really cared. It’s really cool to get the chance to meet you. But, I mean, well, not under the circumstances.”

“I’m sorry about what happened.”

“It still creeps me out. I mean, I still can’t believe it. You couldn’t meet anyone sweeter than Robin, I swear. Her hooking up with Fox in the first place was the craziest thing, I’m telling you. It was like some kind of weird fantasy. When he got arrested for killing those two women, Robin literally threw up. Literally. She’d slept with this guy for something like three months. I mean, I’m not pretending she was some kind of saint or anything. I’m not saying that. She had her thing.”

“Her thing?”

“Sex. Robin had a healthy sex life. Normally healthy. Not a freaky sex life, like they tried to say during the trial. She was a healthy American girl living in New York City in the twenty-first century, hello? You don’t go out and slaughter a person just because she wasn’t a virgin.”

“Is that your theory? That someone killed Robin because they were disgusted with what they considered an immoral lifestyle?”

“God, I don’t know. I’m just thinking out loud. Who can get into the mind of a freak? She was a good person. She was a good Quaker. It’s Robin who got me into the whole Quaker thing. She brought me along one day, and I really enjoyed it. You don’t have to sign up or anything like that. That’s part of what’s so cool about it. They accept you however you are.”

I spotted Edward Anger over by the sweets table. “What about him?” I said.

She followed my gaze. “Edward? What about him?”

“I understand he kept in touch with Robin while she was holing up.”

“Sure. He called her now and then. I think he went over to see her a few times. Checked up on her.”

“Any Quaker queasiness on his part about Robin being caught up in this whole Fox thing?”

Michelle laughed. “Oh, you mean like a scandal? No way. I just told you, the Quakers are very cool people. They’ve got that whole thee and thou rap, but come on, have you ever been to a Catholic church? I’ll take thee and thou over smite and hellfire any day.”

“Mr. Anger was quite eloquent,” I said.

“Oh, sure. Edward can’t say ‘good morning’ without turning it into a beautiful speech. That’s just the way he is.”

I let it drop. “Did Robin ever talk to you about Zachary Riddick? I remember seeing some of her testimony. Riddick did a real sleaze number on her.”

Michelle rolled her eyes. “No kidding. I was right there in the courtroom when he started up with that crap. Robin asked if I could be there for moral support on the days she was testifying. Were you watching the day he actually hit on her right there on the stand? Unbelievable. This is a defense attorney? The man is cross-examining the witness and he’s practically reaching a hand up her dress. I don’t mean literally. But really, he might as well have been. Robin told me afterward that was exactly how she felt up there. It was disgusting. Explain to me what is the relevance of a witness’s personal life, anyway. That whole thing was so disgusting, what they did to her. Fox is the one who seduced her, not vice versa. He’s the one with the reputation. But Riddick was trying to make Robin out as the aggressor. Like she was some sort of slut. Which couldn’t be farther from the truth.”

“I know he was,” I said. “He was wrapping his whole defense around the fact that Fox and his wife got back together once he’d managed to free himself of all these wanton women who’d been taking pieces of him just because he was a celebrity down in the dumps. Riddick was just trying to find the angle to make the guy look wholesome.”

Michelle exploded. “He murdered two women! What the hell kind of wholesome is that?”

Heads turned our way. Tears had leaped to Michelle’s eyes, and she wiped at them angrily with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry, but he was a real freakazoid. I mean, Riddick. Fox, too. But Riddick. Do you want to know what he did?” She dabbed at her eyes with the back of her wrist. “When he was getting ready to put Robin on the stand, he called me into his office. I don’t know why I went. It was a stupid thing to do. But I don’t know how these things work. I thought, Anything I can do to help Robin. I got there, and he tried to get me to give him dirt on her. On Robin. I couldn’t believe it. But here’s the thing. He’d actually investigated me. He started telling me about stuff I’d done, he had a list with some of the men I’d dated, stuff like that. Like I was relevant to any of this? There was this one guy I’d gone out with just a couple of times, but there really weren’t any sparks. Riddick had dug this up. We hooked up with Robin one night, and there was actually some chemistry between them. Things were already fizzling with us, and he called up Robin and asked her out. Robin checked with me first. There’s no way she would have gone out with him if it had bothered me, but I could’ve cared less. I told her to go for it. They dated a bit. I think they slept together a few times. And it ended. Nothing to it. Life in the city.”

“But Riddick was trying to pump it up?”

“You bet. He kept trying to get me to say that I was secretly pissed off at her, that she was sexually aggressive and was a man-eater and all this crap. I told him to go to hell.”

“It’s an old ploy,” I said. “Lawyers try that move all the time.”

“Well, here’s the thing. While I was in his office? He came on to me. Big-time. It was just like he did with Robin when she was on the stand. The guy’s digging into my sexual history, and I don’t know, I guess it gets him all turned on. For some reason, he thinks he’s God’s gift to women. But I can tell you, he was no gift to me. I probably should have contacted some lawyers’ association or something. That couldn’t have been ethical, what he was pulling. You know what his basic move was? He started telling me what I looked like. I mean, like, describing me in detail. To me. As if I don’t know what I look like? Maybe he thought he was coming off as complimentary and sexy, but no way. I couldn’t wait to get out of that place. Then two days later, I was at a café near where I live. A place I always go. And there he was, just sitting there. Like he was waiting for me. With this big smile on his face.”

“Are you saying he was stalking you?”

“I don’t know. But it happened another time, too. I saw him on the subway platform. I mean, I guess it could have been a coincidence. But it was so soon after seeing him in the café. And there was that smug look on his face again. He started to come down the platform, but the subway pulled in right then, and I got on it. I hopped off at the next stop and waited for the next train.”

“Did you tell anyone about this?”

“About Riddick stalking me? Not really. I mean, I told a few friends. But I made a point not to mention it to Robin. Things were tough enough for her already. Still, it spooked me. I’ve been looking over my shoulder ever since.”

“I guess there’s no need for that now.”

“You mean with Riddick being dead? Yeah, well, you’d think so. But can I tell you something?” Her eyes traveled around the room again before returning to me. Her voice lowered, and she scooted closer to me. A scent of vanilla scooted over with her.

“Even though he’s dead and everything? I’ve still been having this really creepy feeling that someone is still watching me. Or, you know. Following me. I’m probably nuts, but I really feel it. It’s like…I don’t know. It’s like somebody’s eyes are literally on my skin. I can’t describe it, but it’s kind of freaking me out.”

“Have you actually seen anybody?”

“Seen seen? No. But someone’s there. I just know it. Right after I heard about Riddick being found dead in the park, I was heading back to my apartment, and I could have sworn there was someone following me. And it’s happened once or twice since. I don’t like it. First Robin’s killed, and then Riddick. And the phone message that was on Robin’s machine? I don’t know what to say. This town is beginning to freak me out. I’m getting really scared.”

I gave her my card. “If it happens again, call me. Chances are you’re just being paranoid, which is perfectly understandable. But call me anyway. Just get yourself somewhere very public and call.”

Michelle shuddered. Tears had come again to her eyes, but they didn’t fall. “I just can’t believe what happened to Robin. I mean, one day she’s alive and then…I can’t even begin to think how scary that must have been for her. Jesus. What kind of monster would do something like that?”

I tapped the card. “You’ll call me.”

“Oh yeah.” Her moist eyes blinked at the card. “You’d better believe it. I’ll cry bloody murder. Top of my lungs.”

I prayed it wouldn’t come to that.