“What did this woman look like?”
She shrugged with her eyebrows as well as her shoulders. “I just saw her from the back for two seconds.”
“Did Miranda open the door?”
“I don’t know, I imagine so.” She thought about it for a moment. “Yes, I remember I heard the door close.”
“And you don’t remember anything about this woman?”
“No,” she said. “Just that she was holding flowers.”
“Flowers?”
“Wrapped up in paper, like you get in the street. I remember that.” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, grimaced as she settled into the new position. “That’s all I remember.”
“Did she have dark hair, blond hair-”
“Blond hair, I think. She was wearing one of those hats, like the teenagers wear, but under it I’m pretty sure her hair was blond.”
A woman with blond hair wearing a hat and carrying flowers. The flowers made me think of Jocelyn, but that was silly – it could have been anyone.
The hat, on the other hand, made me think of the cap I’d found on the inside of Miranda’s door. “Do you remember what color the hat was?” I asked.
She strained to remember. “Red? Dark red, almost purple.”
That was the hat, all right. Whoever had worn it had apparently left it behind. Which was all well and good, but it didn’t tell me anything about what happened to Murco’s money.
“Are you sure there was no one who visited her more recently than that? Maybe on the afternoon of the thirtyfirst or the morning of the first?” I tried to picture how large a package containing half a million dollars in hundred- dollar bills might be. Also how heavy. “Maybe someone carrying a shopping bag or a satchel, or maybe a suitcase?”
She shook her head helplessly. “Just the man from the cable company. He had one of those cases on wheels, the kind you pull with a handle. But no one with a suitcase or a bag.”
“The cable company sent someone on New Year’s Day?”
“No, this was Saturday, maybe five o’clock. I was surprised, too. Usually their service is terrible, and on a holiday evening, forget it. But the reception’s been so bad, someone must have complained.”
“And he went to 4-J?”
“I don’t know, maybe it was 4-H – I just saw him coming this way on his way out. I tried to get him to come take a look at my cable, too, but he said I’d have to call for an appointment. He was quite rude.”
“And he was pulling a case?”
“Sure, for his equipment.”
“Mrs. Krieger,” I said, “what did this man look like?”
“I don’t know. He was young – not like you, but young. Maybe forty. Very short.”
“When you say short… was he shorter than me?”
“Oh, yes. Much shorter.”
Much shorter. “Did he have dark hair? Slick, dark hair?”
“Oh, yes. It looked very greasy. These workers they send over aren’t very clean, you know.”
Very short. Greasy hair. That could describe any of ten thousand men in New York, maybe more. But not in this case. In this case, it described one man: Wayne Lenz. “What made you think he was with the cable company?” I asked.
“Well, he told me, of course. When I came out in the hallway and asked him what he was doing. And he had those things hanging on his belt, those tools they use.”
God only knew what he’d hung on his belt, and God only knew what he’d told this old busybody when she’d stuck her head out in the hall and asked him to fix her cable. But I had a feeling I knew what had been in the rolling case.
Five hundred thousand dollars.
Chapter 19
I was on the street again, and suddenly it was freezing. The wind had picked up while I was inside and I could feel it through my clothes. I pulled my jacket closer around me, felt the weight of Leo’s pistol inside the pocket.
Lenz. It made sense. Here you had a two-time loser, a two-bit con man working in a strip club because he’s never managed to make a real score, and along comes the score he’s been waiting for: his boss is about to make a buy for a million dollars in cash. He had to go for it.
But not by himself, because physically he’s not exactly a powerhouse, and anyway what if he gets caught? He knows what Murco would do to him. So he gets one of the girls to work with him. He picks a loner who doesn’t talk to the other girls much, a girl who doesn’t entirely fit in. Because no matter how many years she’d been doing it, I couldn’t believe Miranda would ever entirely fit in – she’d been a pre-med at Rianon, for God’s sake.
And then he cooks up a plan that gives both of them an extra layer of protection: she’ll recruit some toughs from another part of the city to do the dirty work, they’ll get their cut, and Miranda and Lenz will split what’s left. Yes, Lenz will only walk away with a few hundred thousand instead of a million this way, but by his standards that’s still big money, and it beats taking the personal risk of being the guy who actually holds Murco Khachadurian at gunpoint.
But something goes wrong. The men who pulled the job get caught. They talk, and Lenz hears that they’ve talked – maybe Catch tells him in a moment of illadvised gloating. And now all bets are off. If the men who did the job talked, that means Miranda’s life isn’t worth a damn. And if Miranda has a chance to talk, Lenz’s life won’t be worth a damn either.
That’s if she talks. On the other hand, if what she does is die, he gets to keep the whole five hundred thousand instead of half of it, or whatever split they’d agreed to. And with Miranda dead, maybe Murco will stop looking for more culprits. Even if he doesn’t, how is he going to tie Lenz to the burglary? Lenz presumably took precautions not to be seen with Miranda. To hammer home his innocence, he doesn’t run away after shooting her, he stays right there by the body and phones for an ambulance. Would a guilty man do that?
It wasn’t a complete picture, and the pieces I did have didn’t all fit perfectly. There was the problem of the murder weapon: how had Lenz gotten rid of it before the police arrived? And there was the timing: Miranda must have taken the job at the Wildman long before Lenz could have heard about this particular buy Murco was going to make. Realistically, how far back could he have started setting this plan up? But enough of the pieces fit, and I didn’t feel like waiting around for more to fall into place.
I flipped my cell phone open and stepped into a doorway to get out of the wind. I brought up the phone’s directory, thumbed through the entries until I found the new one for “Susan F.” I realized as the phone dialed that I still didn’t know what the ‘F’ stood for. Probably not Firestone.
Susan picked up on the third ring. “The afternoon of the murder, Lenz came to Miranda’s apartment, dressed as a cable guy,” I said. “He must have picked a time when he knew Miranda wasn’t there, found the money, and taken it out in his equipment trunk.”
“Are you sure?”
“Someone saw him, a neighbor. The description fits.”
“Does that mean he killed her?”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “But it’s sure starting to look that way.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to go talk to him and find out. Do you know where he lives? Did he ever say anything while you were working for him?”
“I know he came to work by train. He was always complaining about the 7 train and the long ride he had,” she said. “That’s all I know.”
