The Ninth Man (16 page)

“Excuse me,” I said, going up the walk until I was parallel with him and he could easily see me without turning around.

“Can I help you?” he asked, wiping the squeegee on a rag he took from his back pocket.

“I hope so,” I said. “I’ve been admiring this building for years, and I wondered if there might be an apartment for rent.”

“I’m afraid not,” he said, bending over to take a sponge from a full bucket of water at his feet. “This building’s a condo, anyway.”

“Really?” I was surprised. “I had some friends who lived here a couple of years ago, and they were renting.”

“That’s possible,” the man said, going on with his work while he talked. “It only went condominium about…oh, a little less than three years, I guess.”

“You live here?”

“Yep. Right here.” He tapped the window with his squeegee. “I was the first buyer, as a matter of fact.”

“Well, then,” I said, playing a long shot, “maybe you know my friends—Gene Harriman and Kyle Rholfing?” Drawing two names out of a mental hat.

The man shook his head.

“Afraid not. The building was totally vacated and renovated before it went condo. All the former tenants were gone when I first found the place.”

Damn!

“Any idea who owned the place before you bought in?” I asked, hopefully.

“Nope.”

He tapped on the window again with the squeegee, using the edge this time; and another man, slightly younger, appeared and opened the casement, giving me only a cursory glance.

“Get me some more water, will you, Gregg?” the older man said, pouring the bucket’s contents carefully along the hedge and handing the now-empty bucket through the open window. His friend took it and disappeared into the depths of the apartment.

“Still only eight units?” I asked.

“Yeah—two to a floor. Say, if you’re interested in a condo, you might try Elsinore Condo Corp.—they’re the ones who did over this place, and they specialize in smaller, better buildings.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”

I turned and walked back to the street just as the younger man reappeared at the window with a fresh bucket of water.

*

All the way to my office, I couldn’t get that building
out of my mind. Eight apartments, seven deaths. Eight apartments, seven deaths. There was something there, other than the obvious implication that the eighth apartment belonged to the murderer. Rholfing had said something…some sort of warning signal I should be acting on, but wasn’t.

Rholfing had been stretching the truth somewhat when he said he’d had the “penthouse” apartment, unless you could consider the top floor of any building a penthouse. But there was something else…about the penthouse apartment…
with a delightful boy named Herb-something.

That’s it! Rholfing had had a roommate! Which meant one of two things—either Herb-something was a prime suspect, or he could well be the next victim!

The case for him being the killer rested largely on my own prejudice—I could see how anyone living with Rholfing might develop homicidal instincts, but I knew that was just fanciful thinking on my part. The question was how in the hell could I track him down.

And if he were not the killer, and assuming he were blithely unaware of what was going on, what if the killer found him? Could he possibly be the hot number with the terrier Elers had mentioned?

No. Rholfing had lived on the top floor; Elers said the kid had lived on the ground floor.

Shit! I didn’t even have a last name to go on!

*

The first thing I did on getting to the office—after opening the window as wide as it would go—was to look up and call the Elsinore Condo Corp. If I could track down the building’s former owner…

I was right in thinking Elsinore Condo Corp. wouldn’t give me the information. It was getting too late in the day to try to make it to the Hall of Records to start a search through volume after volume of trust deeds and land titles, but I swore to get down there the minute they opened the next morning.

When I checked with my answering service and learned I’d had three calls from a Mr. Tim Jackson, my heart fell into my stomach with an almost audible splash. I dialed Tim’s office immediately, only to be told by whomever answered the phone that Tim was tied up with an autopsy. I hoped against hope I didn’t know on whom the autopsy was being performed.

But my stomach told me I did. I left my number then just sat down at my desk and stared out the window.

*

My watch indicated that more than an hour had passed
when
the phone rang, but my mind had been much too busy to notice. I felt like a greyhound at the dog races—no matter how fast I went, the rabbit went faster.

“Hardesty Investigations.”

“Dick? Tim. Sorry to took so long to get back to you, but I had to wait until I could get away from the building. It’s my turn for some bad news…”

“Herb something,” I said, flatly.

There was a pause on Tim’s end, then: “Herb Lopez. How in the hell did you know?”

“Tim,” I said, “don’t ask. I’ll fill you in later. Just give me the when and where.”

“They found him this morning, but he’s been dead at least three weeks—the body’s in pretty bad shape, as you can imagine in this weather. Found at home by his parole officer. It seems Lopez had served at least two terms for sex offenses.”

“Great.”

“Any idea how many more we can expect?” Tim asked.

“No, Tim, I don’t,” I answered.

Eight murders, eight apartments. But Rholfing and Lopez had been roommates. Maybe they’d all had roommates. Dozens of roommates, thousands of roommates, all just waiting for a hit from that magical, mystical amyl bottle. Fuck!

I tore my mind away from this cheery line of speculation and forced myself to concentrate on the issue immediately at hand.

“Do you have Lopez’s address and the name of his parole officer?” I asked.

“I knew you were going to ask,” Tim said, “so I wrote them down. Lopez lived at four-seventeen Bushnell; his parole officer’s name is Brown—Ray Brown.”

I wrote the information on a scratchpad.

“One more thing, Tim. You saw all the bodies, right?”

“Right.”

“Was any of them—and I’m thinking specifically of Lopez, Arthur Granger, or Gene Harriman—about five-ten, slender, very good-looking, medium-brown hair, ice-blue eyes?”

“Nnnnnno…huh-uh, none of them. Granger wasn’t bad looking but not what you’d call overly attractive—he had a black beard and brown eyes. Harriman comes closer, but his eyes were brown, too, as I recall, and he was only about five-six. Lopez’s a Latino: black hair, mustache, brown eyes, stocky. Who’s the guy you’re talking about?”

“You have two pretty fair choices,” I said. “Either the next victim, or the murderer.”

Tim gave a long, low half-whistle.

“Jesus.”

“I couldn’t have said it better,” I said. “Thanks, Tim. I’ll be talking to you soon. You’d best get back to work.”

He sighed. “Yeah. Take care of yourself.”

“You, too, Number-one,” I said as he hung up.

Now, I’m not all that much into stereotypes, but from what Elers had said about the shy kid with the ice-blue eyes, I had a hard time imagining him as a killer. Still, I’ve been around long enough to know that a lot of very sick minds live inside attractive, sometimes beautiful, heads. And whoever had rented the hotel room in which McDermott was killed had registered as “B. Kano,” the name of the kid’s dog, which was pretty strange.

Eight deaths, a shy kid with ice-blue eyes, and a terrier named Big Kano. It was a lot more than I’d had when I started. The question was, was it enough?

Chapter 9

Ed’s call some ten minutes after I arrived home
caught me just
as I was stepping into the shower. I left the water running while I answered the phone.

“How’s it going, Sam Spade?” he asked, and the sound of his voice helped relax me almost as much as the anticipated shower.

“Not to be believed, my lad, not to be believed,” I said.

I thought for a second about professional ethics and about my lifelong habit of not dragging other people into things that didn’t concern them. But, damn it, I felt like talking, and I felt like talking to Ed.

“Remember your offer to lend an ear any time I needed it? Well, I sure could use it now. And I think I mean it this time.”

“You’ve got it. Your place or mine?”

“How about mine, if you don’t mind? I’m just getting into the shower, so keep ringing the bell until I hear it.”

“It might be about an hour or so before I can get there,” he said. “I’ve got a few things to do around here first.”

“That’s okay. I’ll probably still be in there.”

He laughed. “Okay. I’ll be over as soon as I can.”

“
Ciao
,” I said. I put the receiver back on its cradle and went directly to the shower.

*

The dog. It had something to do with the dog, right?
Let’s sa
y somebody killed the kid’s dog…poisoned it. Aha! The kid doesn’t know who did it, but he knows it was somebody in the building, and he vows to get even. A shy kid? Still waters run deep. So he systematically kills eight people.

Great story, but just a trifle far-fetched. Why wait almost four years? Does it really make any sense to think that someone would kill seven innocent men just to get an eighth who might—
might
!—have killed his dog?

Stranger things have happened, but it just wasn’t logical. There had to be something more to it.

Suppose it wasn’t the kid at all. Suppose the kid was out there somewhere right now, all innocent and shy and blue-eyed, and somebody’s ringing his doorbell right this minute with his hand in his pocket holding onto an amyl bottle…

Somebody was ringing my doorbell. Ed already? It seemed like only five minutes since I’d hung up the phone. I turned off the water, yelled, “Just a minute,” and grabbed for a towel. A glance at the clock on my dresser showed that either it was off by more than an hour or I’d lost all sense of time again. Knowing me and showers, I opted for the latter.

Semi-dry, I wrapped the towel around me and padded to the front door, opening it to find Ed leaning against the frame, a finger poised over the doorbell.

“Come on in,” I said.

He followed me into the living room.

“Too early for a drink?” I asked.

“It’s never too early,” he said, grinning.

“Good. Why don’t you do the honors while I finish drying off and get dressed?”

I did a quick blow-dry of my hair and slipped into a pair of jeans while Ed made the drinks. When I returned to the living room, he was sitting on the couch, looking through a month-old issue of
Time
.

“I see here that somebody’s shot President Lincoln,” he said as I walked over to join him. He set the magazine down, picked up my drink from the coffee table, and handed it to me. “It’s probably a little strong, but I figured you could use it.”

I tasted it. He was right.

I sat beside him and took a long swallow, draining nearly a third of the glass.

“That bad, huh?”

“That bad,” I agreed.

“Well, I brought both ears. Any time you’re ready…”

*

I told him everything, from the minute Rholfing first swished into my office to the minute he—Ed—rang the doorbell. When I’d finished, he just sat there quietly, looking at me. Finally, he got up, took our now-empty glasses, and went to make us another drink.

“That,” he said from the kitchen, “is some story. Where do you intend to go from here?”

“Tomorrow, to the Hall of Records,” I said, talking a little louder so he could hear me. “Then to whomever owned the building. From there on, it’s anybody’s guess.”

He returned and handed me my refilled glass.

“What about the police? Don’t you suppose they’ll solve the whole thing eventually?”

I took a sip and set the drink on the coffee table.

“I sincerely doubt it,” I said. “Do you realize how many unsolved murders take place in this town every year, even when the police are really
trying
to solve the case? With gay murders, let’s be charitable and just say their usual enthusiasm in pursuing justice is somewhat tainted with homophobia.

“And even if they were doing their very best, they think it’s some homophobic serial killer randomly murdering faggots, which makes the odds of finding him astronomical.

“I don’t think he’s a homophobe, and I don’t think the killings are random. I’m sure he knows exactly what he’s doing…I just don’t know why. You can’t find what you’re not looking for, and from everything I can gather, the police are not looking for a link between the victims. At least, they’re not looking hard enough.”

“You could always tell them,” Ed said logically.

“Yes, I could. But why should I? At least right now. If I were to tell them what I know, who’s to say they’d follow up on it properly? And it’s almost guaranteed they’d do everything in their considerable power to see to it I got off the case and stayed off. I’d probably be arrested for obstructing justice for not identifying myself after I found Rholfing, and just as probably lose my license.

“I’ve had a couple of professional encounters with the police before. I know how they operate. No, I’d rather go the whole distance on my own. Then we’ll see what happens.”

We sat in silence for a moment.

“You know,” I said, “one of the frustrations in all this is not having a single real suspect—except possibly the shy kid with the terrier. If this were a detective novel or a movie, there’d be suspects coming out of the woodwork.”

“What about me?” Ed asked. “Wouldn’t I qualify?”

I shrugged.

“Oh, sure. You. For having a phone number. Or Gary Miller, for being tired of being cheated on. Or Martin Bell, out of unrequited love for Arthur Granger. Open the phone book and pick out a name. But did anyone I’ve talked to know all eight men—and know them when they lived in that particular building? Did you?”

Ed shook his head.

“I see what you mean,” he said.