There had been a presence about him. She had thought, upon seeing this man, He is just like me somehow. “Tell me his name. Is that alright? Am I allowed to know his name?”
“Richard Daley.”
“Are you sure he’s the one? It seems like a mistake.”
“Why don’t you just tell me the story again.”
“Alright. Well, it’s just what I told you. Does your friend know the story already?”
Buczynski had agreed to drive his counterpart from Boston as a courtesy. They had worked together before. Gedaminski had been to New York chasing this or that suspect, usually Daley. A real pro, a good thief, often worked out of town, the better to go unrecognized. Gedaminski had long suspected that Ricky Daley had paid a few visits to Manhattan to steal and not be bothered. Gedaminski knew, too, that Ricky worked with the same fences over and over, a trusted few, and none of them were in Boston. There was no better place to fence jewelry than New York. There it could be quickly broken up and moved. Often the only way to catch a good thief was to follow the swag. It was very easy to steal, but very hard to dispose of stolen things once you’d got them. Most thieves had to settle for twenty or thirty cents on the dollar from a fence. Good thieves did better; there was less risk in dealing with them. Burglary detectives spent much of their time trolling pawnshops and jewelers, tracking the swag. Gedaminski would have given his left nut to know where Ricky Daley fenced his stuff. He and Buczynski had canvassed the usual layoffs in New York several times, with no luck. Gedaminski got along fine with Al Buczynski, though Buczynski talked too much, and the Old Spice he wore gave the Bostonian a roaring headache and made him suspicious of the entire NYPD, since perfume on a man was a sort of subterfuge, and perfume on a cop smelled like corruption.
“Well,” the woman said, “it’s just like everybody says: Where were you when you heard Kennedy was shot? I was in Boston. The Harvard-Yale game was that weekend. We were supposed to stay the whole weekend but we didn’t. They wound up postponing the game, anyway. We were staying at the Copley, my husband and I. We sat in front of the TV all afternoon, it seemed like. We were with friends in the Back Bay. And I was drained and just, just exhausted, I suppose. I just couldn’t bear to watch the TV anymore-they were saying the same things over and over again, hour after hour, I couldn’t stand it. So I went back to the hotel, to the room, while my husband stayed to watch.
“When I got back to my floor, I came off the elevator and I was walking down the corridor, getting my room key out and so forth, and there was this sound, not like a gunshot but like a firecracker or a pop, just crack. Well, I was spooked already from that whole day, so it frightened me and I kind of stopped there in the hall a moment. When I got to the door of my room, I was fumbling with the key. My hand was trembling. I was-well, I wasn’t crying exactly, but tears were coming out, you know?-and I was just anxious to get into my room and lie down. So while I’m trying to open my door, a few doors down the hall a door opens and out comes this man-this Richard Daley. He looked much nicer than he does in that picture. He was wearing a very nice suit and he had no luggage. I noticed he did not have a room key, he was not locking the door behind him. He just pulled the door shut.
“He came walking down the hall toward the elevators. He saw me struggling with my door and as he went by me he said, ‘Are you okay?’ I told him my hand was shaking and I could not seem to get my door open. He said, ‘Here, let me help you. I’m good with locks.’ I gave him the key and he put it in my lock and opened my door for me. That was it. He said, ‘It’ll be okay,’ and he smiled and he turned to go.
“He was really very nice. Very nice. You know, something in his face made me think, you know, just for a moment, maybe it really will be okay. I said to him-not that it mattered, but I just wanted him to stay there for another minute, I don’t know why; I liked him, and it was such a crazy day-I said to him, ‘Hey, you forgot to lock your door.’ So he stops and he kind of looks at the door, and he says, ‘It’s not my room. I just checked in and they gave me the wrong room. I asked for a suite. That room is a single.’ So I said something about ‘Well, it’s a horrible day and you can’t really blame the fellow at the front desk for making a mistake.’ And he smiles-not a happy smile, I mean just a reassuring kind of smile-and he says, ‘No. It’s just a mistake. I’ll go right down and straighten it out.’ And that was it. He went down the hall, and I went into my room, and I never thought anything of it. I never even heard about the robbery in that room. We checked out an hour later and came right home. We didn’t want to be away.”
“You’re sure it’s him?”
She picked up the picture and looked at it again. She was absolutely certain and yet she could not quite hold both facts in her head at once-this was the nice, handsome man she had met in the hotel corridor, and this man was a thief. That he would rob someone during the chaos of That Day, well, it was particularly profane and opportunistic, and it added to her confusion.
“I’m sure,” she said. “Richard Daley. But he wasn’t, he didn’t seem…I just-”
“You’re sure it’s him?”
“Yes, it’s the same man but…he was just in the wrong room.”
“Trust me, lady, he’s always in the wrong room.”
40
Ricky was in the wrong room.
With the lights still off, he worked his hands into a pair of leather driving gloves. These were tan calfskin, very thin. He liked them because the thin leather permitted him to feel, they were not too hot to wear nor too bulky to fit in a coat pocket, and they were stylish. He took pride in the hidden aspects of his craft, just as a master cabinetmaker takes pride in perfect dovetails at the backs of drawers. This was what it meant to have an avocation, a calling. That his life’s work would take place entirely in the shadows, unwitnessed, was precisely the reason to do it perfectly. He was a member of a secret guild, and he felt a little thrill of professionalism when he worked his hands into those gloves, flexing and unflexing his fingers, packing the leather down into the crotches between his fingers. He was at work and happy.
Ricky turned on one light, then lowered all the shades. He made a mental note of where each shade had been.
This would be a leisurely job. He had clocked it only a couple of days-criminal negligence by Ricky’s standards- but Kurt Lindstrom’s one-week engagement with the BSO was a bit of good luck he did not want to miss. Tonight Lindstrom would be in Symphony Hall performing the Pines of Rome, as he had done the two previous nights. The piece was scheduled after the intermission; there was no way Lindstrom would be back before ten.
Ricky searched the front room methodically. He did not touch anything unless it was necessary to see behind or under it, and he meticulously replaced everything.
There was an upright piano in a corner with stacks of sheet music. On the fold-down music shelf of the piano was a handwritten arrangement Lindstrom apparently was working on. Ricky did not read music but he studied the pages anyway. It was written in pencil with a sure hand and no eraser marks or cross-outs. Each line spanned eight full staffs. It looked impossibly complex, coded, mad. Above the piano was a reproduction engraving of a scowling Beethoven.
One wall was lined with bookcases, some improvised from boards and cinder blocks. The books overflowed them and were stacked on the floor in haphazard piles. But there was nothing haphazard about the shelving. In one area were crime novels, everything from Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and volumes of Dostoyevsky to pulps-but mostly pulps. This was a well-thumbed library. More than half were paperbacks, their spines cracked and concave. Lindstrom was a reader and, apparently, a rereader. Ricky rather admired Lindstrom’s library, which was heavy in California noir, Hammett and Chandler of course, but also included a lot of Jim Thompson and Patricia Highsmith and Chester Himes, all filed by the author’s name. There were a few mildly risque titles too, Gang Girl and Hitch- Hike Hussy and that sort of thing. Ricky tipped these out of the line and smirked at the lurid covers: scarlet women in various stages of undress, leering fedora’d men with oversized handguns.
Lindstrom maintained a separate three-foot shelf for his pornographic magazines. They were arranged vertically with spines flush, just as good suburban families arranged their National Geographic s in neat yellow ranks in the den. Ricky realized the danger of rifling through this shelf-no doubt it was a portion of the library Lindstrom visited again and again-so he removed the magazines one at a time and replaced them with precision. Ricky was not immune to the fascination of pornography and he was no prude, but Lindstrom’s magazines shocked him. Not the garden-variety pornography, of which there was quite a lot, with an emphasis on bondage and a separate
