Project Moses - A Mystery Thriller (Enzo Lee Mystery-Thriller Series) (3 page)

Chapter 3

THE FIRST THING that Lee noticed about Sarah Armstrong when he returned to the News newsroom from an extended coffee break was the way she primped her hair, running her hand through the short brown hair styled to slant along her forehead and graze her left eye. She had high cheekbones, almost a model’s face. He guessed that she had a smile that could light up a room. But, Lee could tell he’d have to wait to see it – if he ever did - because her lips were compressed in a manner that suggested impatience, annoyance or both. Her eyes were gray, luminous yet direct. Lee guessed she could be hell on department store clerks and uncooperative reporters.

The other thing that Lee noticed was that she was sitting in his chair. Seeing a stranger sitting at his desk amid the clutter of notepads, phone messages, press releases, and with the partially written story about the pierced-body parts record holder on the computer screen, made him nervous.

“You’re in my chair,” he said

“Are
you
Enzo Lee?” She spoke briskly and in an irritated tone.

“No. I’m Duffy. Who are you?”

“I’m Sarah Armstrong.” She looked puzzled and miffed. “I wanted to talk to Enzo Lee and they told me to wait here.”

“Okay. I was just kidding. You’ve got the right man. But, I don’t have much time. I’m on deadline. And…do you mind if I sit there?”

“By all means.”

As she stood up, Lee took stock quickly. Medium height. Slender but full breasted. She was wearing a moss green sweater that reached her mid-thigh, black pants tapered at the ankle and slipper-like black shoes. She moved quickly, efficiently. He guessed she was 30. Lack of confidence didn’t seem to be her problem.

While Armstrong walked through the space on one side of the desk, he went around the other side and sat down. Lee clicked his half-written story off the computer screen. She took the chair opposite his desk and folded her arms across her chest, her posture ramrod straight.

“Okay,” said Lee. “Let me guess. You want to talk about Judge Miriam Gilbert.”

“How did you know?”

“Join the crowd.” Lee nodded at pink message slips strewn about his desk. In the story that had hit the newsracks the previous afternoon, Lee had complied with Ray Pilmann’s instructions and mentioned the half-empty bottle of Darvon prominently in the story. His article said pointedly that the police had not eliminated suicide as the cause of death.

The messages were from friends and acquaintances of Miriam Gilbert, irate about any speculation that the judge had taken her own life. His phone had been ringing off the hook when he arrived early in the morning. This was the price he was paying for letting himself be sucked into this story. Pilmann had said to tell them all to fuck off. Lee had finally instructed the receptionist to refer all his calls to the city editor. He considered all this Pilmann’s fault anyway.

“Look. Every word in that story is true,” said Lee. He started gathering up the messages, forming a small mound in the center of his desk.

“I know,” said Armstrong.

“You do?”

“I know she had a bottle of Darvon with her. She always did. She had migraines and her doctor prescribed it.”

“Oh, yeah?” Lee made a show of sweeping the messages into his wastebasket.

“And, she didn’t have much of a life outside of her work.”

“Well, that’s what I wrote,” said Lee. He began to fiddle with his computer. He looked up at the newsroom clock.

“What you didn’t say was that she was an incredibly happy woman who valued her work,” said Armstrong, showing no response to his impatience. “She felt very fulfilled. She was finding ways to speed up the courts. That’s what she had been working on so hard. She was looking to the future.”

“Okay, I give up,” said Lee. “What are you? Her psychic? Her personal trainer?”

“I’m her niece. I guess…I just wish you had found out more about her. You read this, and it’s just so cut and dried. You reduce her to six facts and make her seem so lonely and…almost afraid. That just wasn’t her at all.”

Armstrong was silent for a moment. She stared at the wall of the newsroom.

“Dammit!” Her fist crashed on the end of Lee’s desk so suddenly that he involuntarily jumped out of this chair before catching himself and sitting back down. “You don’t care! It was a mistake to come here.”

Lee was trying to think of something to say when Armstrong stood abruptly and walked quickly to the door of the newsroom, her shoulders back and her head held high. As she passed the copydesk, all the old geezers stopped what they were doing and looked.

Lee watched her disappear out the doorway. A couple of the copy editors looked his way. Lee shrugged. Then he turned to his computer. What had she expected, anyway? A retraction? An admission that he was a creep?

After staring at the pulsating cursor for a minute, Lee stood up and walked over to the windows facing 4th Street.

He waited until she walked out of the building’s front entrance. Armstrong stopped at the curb. Her head turned left, then right. Then she walked purposefully across the four-lane street.

***

THE BURLY GERMAN with long blond hair had slimjimmed the door and hotwired the ignition in less than three minutes. With any luck, the stolen vehicle report wouldn’t show up in the police computer until midday.

Hans Dietrich had waited patiently since six in the morning for Sarah Armstrong to emerge from her home. He had stolen the maroon van the night before from one of the dark, quiet residential neighborhoods in the Sunset district.

When Sarah Armstrong came out of the house Dietrich got a good look. She was attractive. He knew she was a lawyer but she was dressed casually. She moved athletically. Maybe a tennis or soccer player in her youth. Dietrich filed all this in his mind as she drove away in a yellow BMW and he followed.

When Armstrong parked across the street from the newspaper building and headed for the entrance, Dietrich parked the van with the engine running a half block from the building entrance and waited with a hunter’s watchfulness. It was a half an hour before he saw her emerge again. He could see that she had no idea that she had been followed or that she had any reason to be afraid. As he pulled the stolen van away from the curb, Dietrich saw her crossing the street quickly.

As Dietrich drew near her and shifted into second gear, he saw the terrified expression on Armstrong’s face as she looked at the oncoming van. She began sprinting to reach the other side. Dietrich twisted the steering wheel hard to the right and floored the accelerator.

Chapter 4

LEE TOOK THE stairs three at a time. By the time he had run through the lobby and out into the morning sun, a cluster of people surrounded the figure sprawled on the asphalt. Someone had placed a jacket under her head. Armstrong was moaning as she struggled to lift herself up onto her elbows. Lee moved between two pressmen who wore gray uniforms streaked with ink. He knelt on the pavement beside Sarah, put his hands on her upper arms and pressed her down.

“Don’t move anything,” he said. “Just stay down. It’s okay to lie here.” She was looking at him but didn’t seem to recognize him. Still, she relaxed and let him push her back down on the asphalt. Then, she grimaced and writhed as pain shot through the shock.

“Call 911. Right now!” Lee told the pressman on his left. As the pressman trotted back across the street to find a telephone, Lee turned back to Armstrong.

“They’ll be here in no time. They’ll take you to the hospital. We need to find out what’s been hurt.” He spoke calmly but insistently. Her eyes were closed. Her forehead was furrowed in pain and she was biting her lip. But she nodded in agreement.

Her last-minute sprint had taken her out of the van’s direct path but the driver had swerved hard and sideswiped her. Lee had lost sight of her behind the van, but guessed that she had been knocked into one of the cars parked along the street before hitting the ground.

He continued holding one of her arms as he looked her over. He saw no bruises or scrapes around her face or head. Her pants were torn on the outside of her left leg where she must have hit the street. He could see some blood and scraped skin, but it wasn’t as bad as he had imagined.

It wasn’t until the paramedics had taken Sarah Armstrong away to San Francisco General that Lee thought to ask the people who had gathered to watch if anyone had taken down the license number or gotten a look at the driver. One of the pressmen volunteered that the van was a Chrysler with tinted windows and that he thought the driver was a woman or a man with long hair.

It was after noon when the hospital finally released Armstrong. By then, Lee had argued with Pilmann over a hospital pay phone about the body-piercing story. The News readers would have to remain ignorant of the amazing facts for another day. The emergency room at the hospital was a barely controlled bedlam of wailing children, broken limbs, high fevers and bandaged cuts and burns.

Lee hadn’t actually planned to spend three hours in the San Francisco General emergency room. However, once the nurses realized his presence was somehow related to the patient being treated for scrapes and contusions, and x-rayed to ensure her bones and joints remained in their original, undamaged condition, he had no choice.

First he was ordered to buy her a pair of oversized sweatpants and a T-shirt. Then he became the designated keeper of Armstrong’s jacket and purse. Lee couldn’t resist a quick peek at her driver’s license. It revealed that she was 32 and that she lived on Sutter Street, in an area not too far from San Francisco’s upscale Pacific Heights neighborhood. Finally, when it became clear no one else was there to ferry her home, Lee became the presumptive chauffeur.

Lee had just exhausted the hospital’s meager supply of Time magazines when Armstrong came out in a wheelchair adjusted so that her left leg stuck straight out. She held a pair of wooden crutches and a brown pill container. She looked alert but exhausted.

“Are you taking her home?” asked the nurse pushing the wheelchair.

“I guess I am,” Lee looked at Armstrong for concurrence. She acknowledged him with a curt nod.

The nurse helped her into the passenger seat of Lee’s Fiat Spider. With the top down, she had no trouble getting in. Armstrong could keep the leg straight with the seat pushed back as far as it would go. As they waited behind another car to exit the hospital parking lot, Lee glanced over at her and saw her profile as she stared out the front of the car. They drove in silence the entire way.

Armstrong lived in the upper flat of an old Edwardian house. It was in a decent neighborhood where the character was defined block by block. Down the street, Lee could see a housing project painted a faded blue. Yet he knew that an exclusive shopping row lay only four blocks to the north. Across the street was a Baptist church painted a tired pink with a cross on the top outlined in neon lights. A bus with the sign “Herb’s Tours” was parked in the driveway along the side of the church.

It was obvious after they parked that Armstrong was intent on getting where she was going without Lee’s help. She slid out of the seat onto the curb, stood on her good leg, and pulled out the crutches behind her. Then she used the crutches to get to the outside stairs.

Lee stood behind her in case she lost her balance and she painstakingly climbed the 10 steps to the front door. When she reached the top, she stopped, rested on her crutches and tried to catch her breath. Then she took the purse Lee was carrying, extracted a key and unlocked the front door. The sight of the flight of stairs heading up to the upper flat made her pale.

“C’mon,” said Lee. He took the crutches from her and set them beside the door. Then he took her left arm. She resisted at first. Then, he tugged a little harder until she relented and let her arm drape over his neck.

“Grab the railing,” he said. “We’ll stop if it hurts.” With his arm around her waist, they mounted the stairs. She used his neck and the railing on the side of the inner staircase for support, and jumped while he lifted and steadied her. In a minute, they were at the top.

“Where to?” he asked.

“The bedroom.” She pointed toward the back of the flat. She hopped still using him for support while he half carried and steadied her. When they reached the queen-sized bed, she let go of his neck, turned on her good leg, sat down and reclined slowly.

Lee retrieved the crutches. On the way back to the bedroom, he glanced around approvingly. It was the type of apartment he might have chosen, rich with natural wood and the detailed touches in turn-of-the-century interiors that he loved. He saw that Sarah was inclined toward art deco style furniture. It looked like she had bought carefully in secondhand stores.

Lee brought the crutches to the bedroom and set them on the floor along side the bed. Armstrong had her arm over her eyes and seemed completely spent. He stepped back to the door.

“Do you want anything? Water? Something to eat?”

She shook her head. Lee paused, trying to decide what to do.

“I saw the whole thing and it looked like more than an accident,” he said. “Do you have any idea why anyone would want to do you harm?”

Armstrong shook her head again, her arm still covering her eyes.

“Look, I’m very sorry about your aunt,” he said. “From what everybody says, she was a fantastic woman. And I’m sorry about the story. You’re right…I just screwed up. It’s too late to change it. The best I can do is wait until the medical examiner figures out the cause of death. I’ll make sure it gets in the paper.”

Lee waited a few seconds. She still didn’t move. He turned to leave.

“Wait,” Armstrong said. She pushed herself up to a sitting position. Lee could tell she was trying to decide whether he could be trusted. He wasn’t sure of the answer. Trusted with what? Her secrets? The story of her aunt’s death? Her honor? He stared back blankly. Finally, she held out her hand to him. “Why don’t we just start over? I’m Sarah.”

“Okay. I’ll go for that,” he said with a half smile of relief. He took her hand and tipped his head forward. “Enzo Lee…at your service.”