A Ticket to the Boneyard

What he said was, "That cop framed me, and I know it and he knows it, the pimping bastard. When I get out I got big plans for him and the two bitches." Then he turned to his left, tilting his head to point his long jaw at me. "That's you and all your women, Scudder. We got something to finish, you and me."

Lots of crooks threaten you. They're all going to get even, same as they're all innocent, they were all framed. You'd think nobody guilty ever went to prison.

He sounded as though he meant it, but that's how they all sound. And none of it ever comes to anything.

That had been something like a dozen years ago. It was another two or three years before I left the police force, for reasons that had nothing to do with Elaine Mardell or James Leo Motley. The precipitant, though perhaps not the cause, for my leaving was something that happened one night in Washington Heights. I was having a few quiet drinks at a tavern there when two men held up the place and shot the bartender dead on their way out. I ran out into the street after them and shot them both, killing one of them, but one shot went wide and fatally injured a six-year-old girl. I don't know that she had any business being there at that hour, but I suppose you could have said the same thing about me.

I didn't get any flak over the incident, as a matter of fact I got a departmental recognition, but from then on I had no heart for the job or my life. I quit the department, and around the same time I gave up trying to be a husband and father and moved into the city. I found a hotel room, and around the corner I found a saloon.

The next seven years are somewhat blurred in memory, although God knows they had their moments. The booze worked for a long time. Somewhere along the line it stopped working, but I drank it anyway because I seemed to have no choice. Then I started hitting detox wards and hospitals and losing three or four days at a time in blackouts, and I had a seizure and, well, things happened.

What it used to be like, what happened, and what it's like now…

"He's out there," she said.

"It seems impossible. He'd have been out years ago. It bothered me at the time that the judge gave him as short a sentence as he did."

"You didn't say anything."

"I didn't want to worry you. But he got one-to-ten, so he could have been on the street in less than a year. I never figured that would happen, he didn't strike me as the type to charm a parole board or get released after serving a minimum sentence, but even so you'd figure him to be out in three or four years, say five at the most. That's longer than most people can manage to nurse a grudge. But if he served five years that would mean he's been breathing free air for seven years now. Why would he wait this long to go after Connie?"

"I don't know."

"What do you want to do, Elaine?"

"I don't know that, either. I think what I want to do is throw some things in a suitcase and get a cab to JFK. I think that's what I want to do."

I could understand the impulse, but I told her it struck me as a little premature. "Let me make a few calls in the morning," I said. "It's possible he did something and wound up back in the joint. It'd be silly to fly to Brazil if he's locked up in Green Haven."

"Actually I was thinking more along the lines of Barbados."

"Or if he's dead," I said. "I thought at the time that he was a good candidate to come out of there in a body bag. He's the type to make enemies, and it doesn't take a lot for someone to stick a knife in you."

"Then who sent me the clipping?"

"Let's not worry about that until we see if we can rule him out."

"All right. Matt? You'll stay here tonight?"

"Sure."

"I know I'm being silly but I'll feel better. You don't mind?"

"I don't mind."

She made up the couch for me with a couple of sheets and a blanket and a pillow. She'd offered me half the bed but I said I'd be more comfortable on the couch, that I felt restless and didn't want to worry about disturbing her with my tossing and turning. "You wouldn't disturb me," she said. "I'm going to take a Seconal, I take one about four times a year, and when I do nothing disturbs me that registers less than seven on the Richter scale. You want one? It's just the thing if you're wired. You'll be out cold before you even have time to relax."

I passed on the pill and took the couch instead. She went to bed and I stripped to my shorts and got under the covers. I couldn't keep my eyes closed. I kept opening them and looking at the lights of Queens across the river. A couple of times I thought with regret of the Seconal not taken, but it was never really an option. As a sober alcoholic, I couldn't take sleeping pills or tranquilizers or mood-elevators or any painkiller much stronger than aspirin. They interrupt sobriety and seem to undercut a person's commitment to recovery, and people who use them usually wind up drinking again.

I suppose I slept some, although it felt a lot like a white night. After a while the sun came up and slanted through the living-room window and I went into the kitchen and made a fresh pot of coffee. I toasted an English muffin and ate it and drank two cups of coffee.

I checked the bedroom. She was still sleeping, curled on her side with her face pressed into the pillow. I tiptoed past the bed and went into the bathroom and showered. It didn't wake her. I dried off and went back to the living room and got dressed, and by then it was time to make some telephone calls.

I had to make quite a few of them, and sometimes it took some doing to reach the person I had to speak with. I stayed at it until I found out what I needed to know, and then I looked in on Elaine again. She hadn't changed position, and I had a moment of wholly irrational panic, convinced that she was dead. He'd let himself in days ago, I decided, and he'd tampered with the Seconal, salting the capsule with cyanide. Or he'd let himself in just hours ago, slipping through walls like a ghost, slipping past me while I tossed on the leather couch, stabbing her in the heart and stealing away.

Of course it was nonsense, as I learned soon enough by dropping to a knee alongside the bed and listening to her steady shallow breathing. But it gave me a turn, and it showed me the state of my own mind. I went back to the living room, thumbed through the Yellow Pages, and made another couple of phone calls.

The locksmith got there around ten. I'd explained to him just what I wanted, and he brought along several models for me to look at. He went to work in the kitchen first, and he was halfway through in the living room when I heard her stirring. I went into the bedroom.

She said, "What's that noise? At first I thought you were using the vacuum cleaner."

"It's a drill. I'm having some locks installed. It's going to come to close to four hundred dollars. Do you want to write a check?"

"I'd rather give him cash." She went to the dresser and took an envelope from the top drawer. Counting bills, she said, "Four hundred dollars? What are we getting, a vault?"

"Police locks."

"Police locks?" She arched an eyebrow. "To keep the police out? Or to keep the police in?"

"Whatever you decide."

"Here's five hundred," she said. "Get a receipt, okay?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"I don't know what my accountant does with them, but he's a bear for receipts."

She showered while I went out and kept the locksmith company. When he was done I paid him and got a receipt and put it and her change on the coffee table. She came out wearing baggy fatigues from Banana Republic and a short-sleeved red shirt with epaulets and metal buttons. I showed her how the locks worked. There were two of them on the living-room door and one in the kitchen.

"I think this is how he got in twelve years ago," I said, pointing to the service door in the kitchen. "I think he came in through the building's service entrance and up the back stairs. That's how he got past the doorman with no trouble. You've got a deadbolt lock on that door, but maybe it wasn't engaged at the time. Or maybe he had a key for it."

"I never use that door."

"So you wouldn't have known if it was locked or not."

"No, not really. It leads to the service elevator and the incinerator. Once in a blue moon I go out that way to the incinerator, but I don't like having to squeeze past the refrigerator schlepping a bag of garbage, so I usually go out the front door and walk around."

"The first time he was here," I said, "he could have slipped into the kitchen and unlocked the door. Then it would have been open both times he let himself into the apartment. Sometime after that it would have been unlocked when you went to use it, but would you even have noticed it?"

"I don't think so. I would have just thought I forgot to lock it the last time I'd used it."

"Well, you don't have to use it at all for the time being." I demonstrated the lock, the steel bar that ran across the face of the door and lodged in a hasp on the doorframe. "This key locks and unlocks it," I said, "but I suggest you just leave it locked all the time. There's no way to unlock it from the outside. I had him install it without mounting a cylinder on the other side of the door. You never come in this way anyway, do you?"

"No, of course not."

"So it's permanently sealed now, for all practical purposes, but you can let yourself out with the key if you ever have to get out in a hurry. But if you do, you can't lock it after you. You can lock the deadbolt with the key, but not the police lock."

"I don't even know if I have a key for that door," she said. "Don't worry about it. I'll keep it closed all the time, and I'll keep the deadbolt and the police lock both locked."

"Good." We returned to the living room. "Now here," I said, "I had him mount two police locks. One of them's the same arrangement as you've got in the kitchen, a police lock that you can lock or unlock only from inside the apartment, with no cylinder on the outside. That way there's no lock out there for anybody to pick. When you're inside the apartment with both locks engaged there's no way anybody can get in without a battering ram. When you go out, you can lock the second police lock with a key. This is the key for it, with the bumps on it. The cylinder's supposed to be pickproof, and the key itself can't be duplicated with ordinary equipment, so it would be a good idea not to lose it or your apartment will be secure against everyone, including you."

"There's a thought."

"You've got a lot of security here," I said. "He put an escutcheon plate over the cylinder so it can't be pried out, and the cylinder itself is some space-age alloy that you can't drill into. While he was at it I had him install a similar guard over the existing Segal deadbolt. All of this probably amounts to overkill, especially if you're planning to catch the next plane to Barbados, but I figured you could afford it. And you ought to have decent locks, Motley or no Motley."

"Speaking of him-"

"He's not dead and he's not in prison."

"When did he get out?"

"In July. The fifteenth of the month."

"Which July?" She looked at me and her eyes widened. "This July? He drew one-to-ten and served twelve years?"

"He wasn't what you'd call a model prisoner."