“Conspiring in the basement?”
“Be nice, Stanley. We might be nice back.”
Brandt shot me a questioning look.
“Oh?” said Katz.
“Yeah. Give me a few minutes and I’ll let you know.”
“What about the dope dealer being killed in his trailer this morning? Is is true you and Kunkle were witnesses?”
“It was a heart attack, Stan, and just hold your horses. I’ll be right back.”
I escorted Brandt to his office and shut the door behind me. He parked on the edge of his desk. “As the man said: ‘Oh?’”
“I was thinking we could do worse than invite him to the stakeout. We’ve really got nothing to lose-or at least not much. If we pull it off, we’ve given him a scoop and made a few points; if we totally screw up, he’ll find out about it anyhow and only make it tougher on us for having been excluded. He might even show us doing our job instead of standing around with our thumbs up our asses.”
Brandt shifted to sit properly at his desk and reached for the phone. “I somehow doubt that, but feel free.”
I crossed over to Maxine’s cubicle to see if Kunkle had called in yet. He hadn’t. I then told Katz to hold on for a couple of more minutes and gathered DeFlorio and Tyler into my office and told them about the tail on Lew Hill.
“Ski Mask is like nothing we’ve ever seen. We’ve got to think of him as a terrorist or something-a cold and careful killer. Don’t underestimate him and don’t make assumptions based on what you’ve learned over the years. This is a new ball game, all right? And keep in constant touch with each other, visually if possible.”
“What about additional backup in case we need it?” DeFlorio asked.
“I’m arranging for undercover state police, but I want you two ready to move as soon as Kunkle calls in. And I want Katz to go with you.”
They both looked at me slack-jawed. I held up my hand. “He’ll write about this anyway, so let’s humor him for once. But keep him out of harm’s way, okay? And don’t get too chatty-just let him know what’s up.”
Katz was waiting patiently by Maxine’s cubicle. “So, were you and Kunkle caught with your pants down or what?”
“Don’t be rude, Stanley, we’re giving you a break. You can go on a stakeout for Ski Mask as long as you keep out of the way, capish?”
“In return for what?”
“Don’t be such a cynic.”
· · ·
At nine o’clock that night, Brandt dug under the paperwork we’d spread all over his desk and answered the phone. For hours we’d been sorting through the accumulated shreds of the case, uncertain whether we were looking for something new or just nervously killing time. He listened for a moment and silently handed the receiver to me. It was Kunkle. “You better get down here. We got problems.” He sounded even more dismal than usual.
The Misery Hilton was actually a large, five-story, bunker-like apartment building on Birge Street. Butternut- colored by day, in the freezing dark it looked more like a cubic black hole, blotting out the stars with its mass. The only sign that it wasn’t as inert as the ground beneath it was a perpetual foul odor of human decay. Whenever calls for the police came from here, the men responding made sure they wore boots-preferably washable ones.
There was an ambulance parked outside when I got there, along with a group of unemployed-looking plainclothes state police. I knew before entering that Ski Mask had somehow found his man.
Kunkle was waiting for me on the third-floor landing. He was leaning against the wall, so turned in on himself he barely noticed I was there. I stepped past him into the room beyond.
The bare bulb hanging from the ceiling made the whole scene look like an Edward Hopper nightmare. There were no soft angles, no single place where the eye could rest without offense. The walls were stained, peeling, cracked, and punctured. The toilet in the adjoining cubicle had overflowed so many times that concentric stains spread across the floor like geologic footprints. The single window had long since ceased to hold glass and was badly boarded up with splintered plywood. There was a three-legged armchair oozing stuffing in one corner, a scarred and mangled chest of drawers next to it, and a bare mattress on the floor along the opposite wall. On the mattress-tied down like a specimen on a lab table-lay Lew Hill. His dry eyes were wide open and his teeth bared against a pain long gone.
There wasn’t much blood, just a few small holes where Ski Mask’s thin stiletto had done its work. I went back outside to the landing. Kunkle hadn’t moved.
“Any theories?”
“I fucked up.”
“How do you figure that?”
He looked at me incredulously.
“No, I mean it. So far, one way or the other, he’s whacked Phillips and now Hill-and he sure as hell helped Haffner along. He’s run circles around us from the start, and the only times any of us have even set eyes on the guy was when I was gassed and when you and I were cuffed together. You might as well take the blame for all of it. It would sure as hell make the rest of us feel better, knowing it was all your fault.”
“Fuck off.”
“Don’t beat yourself up. You’re a member of the club. Go home to bed; I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”
He didn’t move. I went back downstairs and found the head of ththeight=e state police detail. Stan Katz was standing slightly behind him. “So how did he get in?”
“The question should be: ‘How did he get out?’ He was in all along, as near as we can figure. Of course, we were brought in late. It wasn’t our setup.”
“Are you complaining?” He looked at me quietly for a moment. “Are you?”
“No.”
“Me neither. Kunkle laid it out okay. We were watching for comers, not goers. From what I can figure, your guy went straight from this morning’s killing to Hill’s apartment and camped out all day there. I still don’t know how he got out, but this place has a lot of traffic.”
I asked him to send me a copy of his report the next day and returned to my car. I started the engine and kicked on the heater, but I didn’t drive off. Instead I sat there, much like Kunkle leaning against his wall, and gave in to a feeling of total hopelessness.
Katz opened the passenger door and slid in. “Some mess, huh?” His voice was pleasantly muted and unaggressive. I looked over at him. He was just staring out the window at the “Hilton.” His face changed from white to red and back again in the flashing lights from the ambulance and patrol cars.
“Did you go up?”
He nodded. “What the hell is going on? What does Lew Hill have to do with Ski Mask or Kimberly Harris or Murphy’s death?” The question was almost philosophical in tone.
I shook my head. “Don’t know, Stan. Sometimes I think we’ve almost got it, other times I’m afraid we’ll miss the boat entirely on this one. It’s a bitch. And,” I added, “none of that’s a quote.”
“That’s okay.”
He was silent a while more, and then he opened the door and swung his legs out. “I hope you get him. Good night.”
I did too, but I wasn’t sure how realistic that was. All our progress had been toward finding Pam Stark’s killer, and in that area I felt pretty good. Things were falling into place; there was a momentum building that usually boded well. We might well succeed, maybe even soon, but somehow that didn’t seem to matter. In the end, I was convinced Ski Mask would do what he had set out to do-whatever that was-just as he had from the start. Maybe Bill Davis would end up free as a result, but I couldn’t stop thinking that if Ski Mask had a hand in it, that process would be perverted and corrupted, a variation on the one that had jailed him in the first place.
