Judging Time (22 page)

Rick scratched the side of his gray face to keep from smiling for the first time since Merrill died. Here was a militant sister of some kind, wearing a cloth twisted around her head in a turban, heavy boots, several layers and colors of sweaters, vest and skirt down to her ankles. African trading beads and heavy metal necklaces on her chest. Lecturing him about drugs and sexual harassment.

"I don't look like it anymore. But my name's Rick Liberty," he said. He didn't offer to shake her hand.

She shook her head vehemently. "I don't give a shit who you look like or who you be. Don't care if you famous, or rich as Croesus. You touch me and you a dead man."

Rick closed his teeth over his lips. The situation was ridiculous. Black humor in the extreme. Marvin had some sense of humor. He kept his mouth closed, didn't want to insult her by laughing.

"Oh, you think it's funny? Marvin knows I has friends in the community. I has lots of friends. I told him, this nigger touch me, and he's a dead man. Won't have no more problems with his image."

"Are you a nigger—?" Rick said softly, pulling out a chair and sitting. "Ms. . . . ?"

She eyed him suspiciously. "It's Belle. You dissing me, man?"

Rick shook his head. "No, Belle. Nobody in his right mind would dare to dis you."

"What's your point then?"

"Thank you for your hospitality last night. It wasn't my plan to intrude on your privacy."

"Black folk gots no privacy," she said flatly.

Now there was a position he wasn't going to touch. "Well, thanks anyway. I have to go."

"Drink your coffee."

Rick considered the coffee.

"Ain't nothin' about us good enough for you?"

He wasn't going to touch that either. Rick picked up the cup, swallowed the coffee. Who was—the community? He thought of his own community, of Merrill. Numb, he put the empty cup down. "I have to go."

"How you gonna do that?"

"Taxi."

"Ain't no taxis here."

"Fine, I'll call a car."

"With that blockade out there?"

"What blockade?"

"They stop the cars, ask them what they doing here, run a warrant check on the passengers."

Rick frowned, trying to take that in. "The police have a blockade in the street and stop the cars?"

She nodded. "Uh-huh."

"Why?"

"They do it in the buildings, too. Anybody don't belong here gets arrested for criminal trespass."

"Why?" he asked again.

"They sweeping the hood. . . . You got a warrant out?"

"No," Rick said. "I haven't done anything wrong."

"That's what they all say," Belle muttered under her breath.

"What?"

"I gots to go to work. If you hear screaming and arguing in the hall, don't open the door. It's just the police doin' a vertical." Belle smiled for the fust time, revealing a perfect set of small even teeth. "I think the guy they looking for is on the six floor. All the arrests stop right here." She smiled some more. "I told you black folks gots no privacy."

In a closet without a door, she found a few more layers of clothes. She put them on without looking at him again and left the apartment.

Rick heard her lock the door from the outside in several places. After a few minutes he found the phone under a pillow on the sofa and set up his computer.

A few minutes later a commotion in the hall distracted Liberty as he concluded a long E-mail to Jason Frank. His heart thudded at the sound of boots on

the stairs. He got up to look out the window facing the street. There was no squad car in front of the building. Still, he broke into a sweat when the steps stopped in front of his door.

"It's has to be this floor or the next one," a harsh voice speculated.

"Yeah, this is four B." Another voice, higher. A woman. A third set of boots clomped up the stairs to join them.

Liberty panicked. Was this four B? His mouth was dry. His heart thudded. If they were cops, they could break down the door and throw him out the window. Claim he'd jumped. He read stories in the paper every day about the brutal deaths that resulted when people ran from the cops. No way to find out what really happened. Any fatality could occur when the police appeared on the scene and the world would believe whatever lies they told. His heart felt too big for his chest, as if it had swollen up and was about to burst. He was alone. Merrill wasn't there. Tor wasn't there.

Someone banged on the door with a heavy instrument. Could he jump? Not five floors. He looked around for a weapon to defend himself. There were some books in the cartons, the phone, the chairs. Nothing else. The sound came again.

"Police! Open up!"

It wasn't this door. It was the door across the hall. Still, his heart wouldn't slow down. It pounded harder than it had in any game,
as
hard as it had back in Princeton when the cops thought he'd mugged and beaten that poor woman. They never bothered to check and confirm that her purse and all her money were there at her feet. He was amazed to find himself trembling and clammy with sweat. After all these years, he'd forgotten what it felt like to be afraid.

"Police! Open that door! Now!"

His heart continued to throttle up as the pounding on the door continued. The tightness in his chest made him wonder how Tor had felt when he knew he was dying. That son of a bitch had been so helpful, had saved Liberty's life years ago only to destroy it now. Liberty let the anguish of Tor's betrayal grow and intensify in his chest until the treachery itself took over. It felt as if double-bladed knives were slashing him open from the inside. Liberty felt dizzy from the image of the knives slicing his arteries, dizzy from the iron smell of blood and the sense that he and Merrill might have been one, after all. It occurred to him that the greatest irony of all would be that his life was over with hers. The tightness and pain in his chest made him fear he was dying. It also made him think that dying of a heart attack in Harlem might well be the best outcome he could hope for.

"Police, open up."

Chains rattled outside the apartment
as
a door was unlocked. Then a melodious voice sang out, "Praise the Lord." The voice sank to a whisper.

Liberty's eyes drifted back to his computer. He clicked "Send Now" on his E-mail to Jason. Then he began to pull himself together. He had things to do.

24

A
pril finished telling Jason's answering machine she urgently needed his profile of Liberty, hung up, and stared out the window in the top half of her office door. All she could see was the wall above the desks opposite her. The ancient off-white paint, mottled with dirt and cracked in a thousand places, had probably yellowed with disgust long before she was born. In the corner of the ceiling nearest Iriarte's office, craters had formed in the cracks from a water leak that must have recurred numerous times in the last several decades. The next leak would certainly bring that section of the ceiling down on the desk below it, which was Skye's. April couldn't help feeling deeply hurt by the way Iriarte had spoken to her. She wondered if she'd still be assigned in the precinct when the ceiling collapsed.

She had closed the door to recover from the humiliating scene in the lieutenant's office and to study the desk-sized sheet she'd made on Monday to fill in the twenty-four hours before and after the deaths of Merrill Liberty and Tor Petersen. Three days later there still were far too many blanks about the victims' backgrounds and the three suspects they had. The goal was always to have a game plan for an investigation and follow it in as orderly a fashion as possible. But with constantly shifting circumstances, the race against time, and
t
he many variables in the personalities of those workmg the case, chaos nearly always prevailed. It was often luck more than anything else that determined the outcome. Of the three suspects, it was Liberty who was cracking first. As Mike said, it might mean a break in the case and it might not.

From where April sat she could not see Hagedorn on the phone, but she could just hear his plaintive voice.

"That's all you can come up with? What about Motor Vehicle, anything there? Come on, give me a break. You mean the guy never had a speeding ticket?" His voice perked up. "Yeah, car theft, that's more like it. When?"

He burst out, "The fifth of January! You telling me our man boosted a car on January fifth? How come we don't know about it . .. ?
Getouttahere,
he reported his car stolen?"

April pushed some air through her nose. What a jerk. They already knew that. She couldn't stop thinking about Mike. She wanted to talk to him about yesterday morning, try to explain how she felt, knew she couldn't. Sometimes you had to do the right thing and let go. She flipped the pages of her notebook to get her thoughts back on track. On top of everything else Hagedorn was beginning to seriously irritate her. He'd just get hold of an idea and push it around on his plate until he could find the right position for it, then look for facts to back up his theory. She'd heard that scientists did that, too, so you could never believe the conclusions of any scientific study. Sometimes April thought there was no one in the world who told the truth.

She sighed. A pertinent item had been left out of that morning's temper tantrum in Iriarte's office. A woman jogger had been beaten almost to death during an attempted rape in Central Park last night at around seven. She was the second victim in six months. The first had died of her massive head injuries. This second attack had occurred in the 20th Precinct, behind the playground at Eighty-first Street and Central Park West. A highly populated area even in winter because dog walkers went into the park there. If April were still in the Two-O, she'd be working that case instead of the Merrill Liberty case.

On the other side of her door Hagedorn was still whining on the phone. It made her wonder why Iriarte hadn't given him the jogger case. There was good reason for him to be on it. The victim in the case last summer, by the oddest coincidence, had lived in the Park Century, the building where Liberty lived. That investigation had been handled out of Midtown North. The killer was still out there somewhere, and the detectives in the Two-O wanted the files on that case to see if there was a link to this one. With Margaret Mary Joyce now a lieutenant, Sergeant Sanchez and herself all gone from the squad, April figured the Two-O would now need help for almost anything. But Iriarte had assigned two detectives who'd been questioning street people in the Liberty case and not Hagedorn, probably because Hagedorn was good with computers. April's gaze returned to the crater in the ceiling. She told herself to focus on what had gone wrong with her and Mike's investigation of Liberty yesterday instead of what had gone wrong with them personally.

It had been the day of Merrill Liberty's funeral, and they were surprised to find Liberty at home. He was wearing the same clothes he'd worn on the night of the murders. He was unshaven and seemed dazed. After opening his apartment door to her and Mike, Liberty turned his back on them to return to the area in the great open space that served as the dining room, where he must have been seated alone at his long and gleaming ebony dining table. April had been fascinated by that table. It was a graceful oval large enough for twelve. The surface was as shiny as new Chinese black lacquer. Eight matching ebony chairs with shiny white satin seats were placed at wide intervals around it. Four more were positioned against the wall. Liberty sat at the head of the table like a chairman of the board, a man of expensive black and white tastes. There was nothing to eat or drink on the table, and

there were no board members around him now. A solitary laptop computer, sitting in the end curve of the oval, was keeping him company. He had hurried back to it.

When the two detectives followed him through the arch designating the room change from entrance hall to dining room, he punched a button, removing a document from the screen; then he shut down the computer for good measure. April took a position on one side of him. She unbuttoned her coat and glanced at Mike, who stood on the other side. They could see each other, but Liberty could see only one of them at a time. He was vague. He ran his fingers over the keyboard of the computer. The keys made a clicking sound, as if he were typing the answers to their questions. Without looking at them, he'd told them they could search the apartment and do whatever they had to do. He told them what he'd worn to Chicago. The coat was in the closet, the suit was on the chair in the bedroom. The shoes were in the closet. He said he hadn't been watching the clock so he didn't know exactly what time he got home, went to bed. He said he didn't go out after he returned home. He talked about the stolen car and Wally Jefferson. He was convinced there was a tie-in between him and the murders. He couldn't be specific about why.

April didn't know much about football, but she'd seen Liberty on TV once or twice. On TV he was striking, a big, handsome man with black hair, the kind of jawline Jason Frank and the Kennedys had, and a powerfully focused gaze that made the viewer feel he was completely at ease in front of the camera.

Yesterday, he'd looked gray, internally soft, as if the structure of his body were no longer sound and inside he'd melted down to nothing. Still, he'd been annoyed by their running the route from the apartment to the restaurant a number of times. He said it was a futile exercise, since there was a camera in every elevator and cameras in the stairways. If he'd left his apartment on the night of the murder—if he'd gone

out either way—the person manning the cameras in the security room would have seen him. He seemed very sure that could not have happened.

And then Liberty's eyes had become very sharp. "Why are you doing this to me?" he demanded.

"There's nothing personal about it," Mike replied. "We do it to everybody."