'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
April 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 the 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 . .. ?
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.
